In the Whole World
by pennyante
Summary: To prevent civil war, the "savior of humanity" Kara Thrace agrees to build a Temple of Unity on New Earth. Dangers mount as theisms clash and militarism persists. What will she do when she learns someone is coming for her? Lee/Kara, castfic/all spoilers
1. Prologue: Another Tide

**Disclaimer: Mine, but by love, not by law and definitely not by origination.**

**Spoilers: All. I break with canon, in some small ways that will become large, from the moment Kara enters the coordinates in **_**Daybreak.**_** (Although, like many of you, I think it's RDM that broke it by ignoring the fact that he'd made a show that was about fellowship—with all its problems—and not just survival.)**

**This is a Lee/Kara story of castfic dimensions that will eventually span a couple of planets and multiple timelines (I hope) neatly. Reviews always deeply appreciated.**

_****_

"I couldn't keep you safe from harm my love, but I kept you—I keep you—in my heart."

Old words. Their first dawn on New Earth found a small group from Galactica standing at a grave on a mountainside and listening to Bill Adama speak them. Only a handful of them knew just how old those words were.

Saul Tigh was one. He could remember, now, since they'd all had their hands in Sam Anders' Hybrid bath together, devising which memories of Cylon customs they would implant in Galen's history, so they could hold onto some of the old ways—even if only tenuously, if only by proxy. He wondered, now, that he hadn't felt an electric surge of recognition when Galen had first intoned these words at Cally's funeral.

Today, the poetry of it was lost on him in other ways, as well; he was watching his old friend's face more than he was listening to him speak. Saul was resolved to monitor Bill's desolation. He knew every vent and ballast that despair could crawl into, in a man's soul.

So of course he knew the admiral was sinking.

"You were the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins, the light in my eye, and now that breath… that breath. That breath is gone. That blood and light are… gone."

Then there was Kara, her hair pulled resolutely back from her face, her green surface fatigues pressed around the epaulets with viper pins pointing resolutely heavenward, all signs that she was playing at order and composure despite the reckless chaos swirling in her head. She was listening—so it seemed to Lee—almost _too_ intently, was praying along with the admiral, seeking as ever to regain in rite what she'd long ago lost in reason.

She knew Lee was watching her. He'd been watching her, surreptitiously but undauntably, for the eighteen hours they'd been on this planet, as if he expected her to disappear in the space where he blinked. It had to be ignored. There was nothing to say to it. The weight of those eyes meant too much, and he saw too much—but understood as little as she did, and maybe less.

She had landed a battlestar directly on a planet—a habitable planet—using FTL coordinates. She had buried her own corpse. She was still here.

That last fact was one she mostly knew because she could feel Lee's eyes on her.

"Now I am left a voice."

Galen Tyrol lifted his hand automatically to draw a line down his throat—the traditional gesture at this part of the ceremony. _Traditional where? In Cylon church? _Yes. Yes, that was precisely where. He saw Saul raise his single, expressive eyebrow at him, while Ellen's eyes flared in sudden recognition and she lifted a hand to her neck, as well. _Wired into my muscle memory_, he thought prosaically. And then lifted one corner of his mouth, mirthlessly. _Wired is right. _

Since they'd all had their hands in Sam's hybrid bath and had recovered so many memories, the Chief's consciousness kept betraying him, kept flickering—projecting—to the last time this ceremony had been undertaken. When he'd said these words over an absence, speaking to the cold infinity into which Cally had gone. He kept thinking of other things he might have said, words that maybe could have held all the senselessness at bay by calling attention to it.

_We stand here to memorialize happenstance. To memorialize fate. They are one and the same. They are the thread and fabric of history, equal and indistinguishable, because they are so equally and indistinguishably beyond our control. _

He was still getting used to those projections. He found that he lived, still, in the corridors of Galactica, when it was still whole, and in the air, in those precious, precarious moments before everything had been lost. Now, watching the old man, he let his mind drift to the admiral's quarters, let himself sit down there, run his hands down the smooth portside of the admiral's model ship as it had been before the old man had broken it.

There were few places, even in his own consciousness, as utterly alone as this. Sitting there, he knew that he and Bill Adama were the same, now, perhaps had always been the same.

It was in their wiring.

"…the Lords of Kobol, as many and varied as mortal men, must bend down and lean low to hear my lament."

Lee had watched the wordless exchange among the Cylons, wondered at it. He knew it made Kara crazy, that he spent so much time watching, evaluating, had such a limited gift for impulsiveness. And while he knew that Kara wished he weren't watching_ her_—her eyes pleaded with him to stop—she didn't know that her eyes followed him even when he turned away. _He_ knew it. He could feel them on his back, as heavy as her body had been there, one humid night six years ago in Caprica City when he'd had to heft her over his shoulder to get her drunk ass out of trouble in her favorite bar.

Sometimes Lee thought he could tell the story of his life as a series of times he'd walked into or out of a bar with Kara Thrace.

_And where was Zak, that night? Right. Out at the tracks, arguing with gamblers, gone to save a pack of wild dogs. Salve for being in the army and not in veterinary school, where he belonged._

This was a day—there would be more of them, now that they were on a planet, now that the idea of _home_ had reverted to mean something more like what it had used to—a day when he missed his brother. Zak had had a light touch with other people's pain. Not to say that he had been shallow, exactly… Lee winced. His own heart was hurting, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he could summon the right words, he could show up, but he couldn't _be there_, not for his father, not in a way that would ease their grief.

He winced again—though not so anyone could see—on noticing what was breaking over his father's face now. "Lords of Kobol, release us into an ocean of sorrow, that we may drown our hearts there. Take pity on our mortal loss."

_Dad must've made her some promises. No way could he dredge this ceremony up of his own volition. He doesn't believe in the Lords of Kobol any more than Gaius believes in avoiding limelight._

Gaius Baltar, for all that, was decidedly somber. Standing between the Doc and Athena, staring straight ahead, his face was frozen solid. He had asked all of his questions earlier, and his mind was blank, now, no longer able to wonder whether his actions on Galactica at the colony had been enough, at the end, to earn what he'd come, despite himself, to want most: the dead woman's forgiveness.

"Now, for the first time in too long, we return one of your daughters into warm earth instead of cold air. Her breath and blood and light, we have lost, but know remain near us. Her spirit, we launch back into the universe."

Athena watched the admiral glance quickly up at the sky—very quickly, as if he couldn't bear the brightness—and saw Gaius… was he wiping tears from his eyes? It must be, because there was Doc Cottle, surreptitiously passing him a handkerchief.

Athena, like Lee, had been watching. She was thinking about how much misery they had brought with them to earth, wondering how those around her would survive it, mentally retracing the series of events that had led to her family's happy ending and wondering how precarious their happiness was.

_Karl frakked another woman three days ago and didn't notice it wasn't me. _

_Boomer is not me. She isn't. I made that decision a long time ago._

_So why don't I have the guts to bust Karl for cheating?_

Athena worried about herself, as the admiral had worried about his species in a retirement speech she'd heard years ago in another woman's memories, worried about whether she _deserved_ the form of survival she'd found.

"So say we all."

There was a long beat, and then the assembled congregants came back together. "So say we all," they murmured in uneven unison.

There was a long, impossible silence. Then Starbuck tore away to an isolated spot beneath the trees, wrapped her arms around herself, began muttering anew in prayer. Saul was unsurprised; nothing new there. She'd been shivering and murmuring in intervals since they'd set the first ship down on the planet eighteen hours before. It was no great mystery, either; as Saul saw it, the events of the last few months of her life had contrived to exhaust even Starbuck's supply of bullshit.

After reaching the end of the line, a man needed either answers or consequences. Starbuck seemed to have been granted neither.

Any moment, Lee would be chasing after her, offering his usual cocktail—an offer of support, a demand for an explanation, a pious judgment. What a sad, sorry lot she'd drawn. Saul didn't have the heart to watch.

"That was a lovely service, Bill," he heard his wife say, wrapping her hands around the admiral's.

Bill's bearing had never been less military, less regal, less commanding. "_Why_ do we hold these things at dawn?"

Ellen was gentle. "Because that's when it hurts the most that they're gone."

He and Ellen bent to help Bill pile stones around Laura Roslin's grave. That was another old custom. _Returning one of your daughters to earth instead of air._ At long last, there was soil where there had been airlocks. It seemed more solid, more suitable. These stones they were accumulating would abide.

When they ran out, Saul walked through the congregants to gather the rocks that had been piled up under the nearby baobabs in preparation for this ceremony, and despite himself, heard snatches of whispered conversations.

"Don't be an idiot, Galen, of course you shouldn't _leave_. Humans—and cylons—aren't meant to live in isolation." Athena was obviously annoyed at the very idea. "You'd go mad inside a year. And what would the centurions—"

"Oh, yeah, now _that's _something to live for. Robot free love. What I dreamed of as a little boy."

A few feet away, Starbuck was having no easier time deflecting Lee. "Not now. I can't do this now. Your father can't cope with any of it."

"Then when, Kara? You think he's just gonna go away? Or will it be you, this time? I can't keep track of whose turn it is…"

Saul returned, stooped down to where Bill was kneeling, shattered, over the grave of the first president to be buried on New Earth, and he pressed a large stone into his hand. "We need you, Bill. We're all gonna sink without you."

Bill didn't even look up. He was murmuring something—Saul couldn't quite tell. Something about a raft? His old friend wasn't quite in his right mind.

"Bill, now is not the time to fall apart—I know things are rough, now, that you're going to need some time, but…"

Bill tuned Saul out. He placed the large stone at the head of the grave, then swung his knees from beneath him, and he—the great commander—laid down on his side, on the ground, facing the newly piled mound of earth.

The admiral closed his eyes and pictured a cabin in a wood, with high eaves, surrounded lovingly by a stand of pines. _Not here, not here. No pines are growing here, maybe nowhere on this planet. But at our cabin…_

Saul let him be. He recognized projection when he saw it, even in humans. It was among the deepest forms of denial, one around which both their species had evolved over millennia. Watching Galen stalk down the mountain alone, and Lee, hot on Kara's heels, lecture her all the way down to camp until, reaching the first row of tents, he threw up his hands in the air and stalked away, Saul shook his head.

Projections were the order of the day.

"Some promised land."

Ellen just smiled and tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. "It was never supposed to be paradise."

Gaius, though, was frowning—not at them, but over their heads. "Not to add rain to the soggy New Earth parade the two of you are throwing, but… do you think it's troubling that the Raptors haven't made it back with a report on this planet's tylium supplies yet?" There were, in fact, Raptors overhead in the distance, but they were flying out, not returning.

"This planet is suitable for people. It'll have fuel. It has to." Saul set his jaw. Ellen just clutched his arm more tightly.

It was their first day in—no, not paradise. But the new world, the home they'd make together.

Only Gaius Baltar—as usual—was ready to start borrowing trouble.

****

By nightfall, Admiral William Adama—or at least, he had been an admiral, and had that only been yesterday?—had stood up, paced off the area for the cabin he knew he'd build right here. Wherever the encampment moved, here he'd stay. He spent the afternoon gathering firewood from the woods above the site.

He wasn't prepared for visitors, and certainly not for 30,000 of them.

The first to come were two Leobens, bearing a very large, deep tub between them, which they set at the foot of the grave. They drew long lines down their throats, chin to sternum, stopping next to their hearts. The two dozen men and women who followed came bearing large buckets of water, which they overturned into the tub. And then a group of Sixes and Eights, with a few humans among them—one was Kara—who joined hands around the grave and began to sing:

"_OMMMM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât…"_

Bill Adama felt that song sink low into his chest. It sounded like Old Gemenese—but somehow turned and… twisted. He wondered if he was hearing an ancient Cylon prayer.

Thereafter, tides of humans kept coming in. Members of the fleet arrived in a relentless line of torches creeping slowly up the mountain. When they arrived, they drew lines down their throats, or prayed to the Lords of Kobol, or to Gaius Baltar's One God, or to the Cylon God… or spoke to Laura, herself, as if she might reply. He heard more than one apologize to her for having voted against her. All in all, they undertook a thousand rituals before, each, dipping their torches into the buckets and extinguishing the flames, and returning to a darkened camp.

Down below, even the emergency lights from the nearby ships were shut off tonight. There was a moon above them. Caprica hadn't had a moon. This moon's kept reminding them that they weren't home, they were in a place with strange light and strange tides. It was hard to grapple with that; he could feel himself being pulled in only one direction.

Down.

Elliot Trebol, who was both the woman who had first advocated for shutting them off and the captain of the _Calliope_, arrived near the end of the procession. Standing at the foot of the grave, she knelt down in front of that wide basin of water and submerged her head in it, emerging covered with the ashes that the extinguished torches had left behind. It was an old Tauron ritual, and _Calliope's_ captain wasn't the last person he saw undertake it. He couldn't quite remember, but he knew he was looking at something from one of the old human civil wars. There was a metaphor in it, about devastation and dignity, about carrying the legacy of violence.

She bent her head toward him deeply and solemnly, as if to say:_ This is why we do this at nightfall_.

He let himself think about those people who'd remained in the camp below, choosing not to come up here to pay their respects to Laura Roslin. Those thoughts were a kind of harmony against the melody of the night. Of the surviving members of the fleet, nearly a quarter were down in the mess halls, talking and toasting and laughing and frakking in the tents below. There were those who would be gratified that she had died on the Feast Day of New Earth; Bill didn't doubt that, for them, the death of the woman they saw as a tyrant would only add to the revelry.

He just wished she were there to laugh about it.

By and large, those who made the journey up the mountainside to pay their final respects to Laura Roslin, cylons and humans, former prisoners and former quorum delegates, said the same four words over and over:

_Thank you, Madame President._

Laura Roslin hadn't lived to see what vestiges, what scraps and pieces of cultures and peoples and traditions, she'd managed to save, when she'd endeavoured to save what she could. Had she been there, she might have pointed out that her fiercest opponents, toasting her death down in the base camp and scoffing at the idea of mourning her, were the ones who affirmed her mission best of all.

Bill Adama, one-time admiral of a now-defunct battlestar that had found a final resting place on earth a few hundred yards away, watched it all from beneath low-hanging branches.

He was thankful it was dark. Even though his own final mission was over, he didn't think it would be fitting for the fleet he'd commanded to see him cry himself blind.


	2. Signs

Strange as it was to simply step off a grassy plain, walk up some steps and open a door to get inside Galactica, the flickering fluorescence in its hallways nonetheless felt peaceful and normal to Kara. In the two weeks since they'd arrived, it had become routine for her to report to the CIC every morning directly after breakfast. Not under orders; the crew of Galactica, mostly charged with maintaining peace between wary Cylons and the fractious civilian fleet, didn't meet here anymore. Maybe Lee and his quorum did. She didn't know.

She'd been avoiding learning where they met. She'd been avoiding Lee altogether. _Too risky._

In the air around her, she knew, was a desire for newness, to start everything all over—new jobs to do, new people to drink with, new flora and fauna and starlight. A new history to imagine. Kara could see it, had seen it in the faces along the makeshift bar in the center of camp last night and the shouts of children she'd heard as she'd crossed from her tent to the battlestar this morning. She even envied it.

But she didn't _feel_ it. She couldn't let go of all that had gone before. The stares she got as she walked around camp—that she'd ignored even as she walked here this morning—weren't helping. The stares marked her as something other than human, and even if that something was _more_, living with it meant living with less_. _It was like how they'd looked at the Cylons, when they'd first begun to merge with the Twos and Sixes and Eights.

But with still more fear, even when her name rose up in a cheer for bringing them all home.

Each morning, she ignored the whispers and stares and came inside Galactica to visit her Cylon husband. Today, walking down a hallway that the constant light of the sun had reminded her was glaring but nonetheless _dim_, she set her jaw determinedly. Today. She'd work out a plan for rehabilitating Sam today. She had to; she didn't know how much time she had left, but she could still feel a clock ticking in the part of her heart that had been counting down from the moment she'd returned to the fleet with the directions to earth. For everyone else, their lives were stretching out at their feet, around them. Kara was a dog at the end of a chain, and somewhere, someone was tugging on it. Calling her back.

She quickened her steps. It was all the more reason to hurry.

_Gods, but if Athena and Helo don't find any tylium on their patrol, how long before these lights go out? And will Sam go with them? _

She knew that most people were beginning to figure out that this planet wasn't the solution to every last problem they'd brought with them.

Gods, this planet. It had never occurred to Kara that the coordinates she'd programmed into the FTL for a last desperate jump across space would land the battlestar directly _on _a planet, and it still, these two weeks later, made her shiver to think how precisely that song had mapped human destiny. For that jump to have been so dangerously exact, the coordinates in the song had been timed to the planet's orbit and rotation—to the season and the time of day. The images of it coming in from space, as the rest of the fleet had jumped to safer distances, showed that this new Earth was mostly water. It was a miracle they hadn't landed in the ocean. Or a few miles up in the air, only to freefall through the atmosphere to the ground.

_Which means they knew the second of the day, month, and year that I would program the jump. They must have._

_And who the hell are "they_," _anyway, Kara? The gods? Why'd they choose you? And why are you still here?_

She scowled.

_One answer at a time. Concentrate on Sam._

"Morning, Chief," she called upward from the CIC floor, unsurprised that he'd beaten her to Sam's side this morning. Unlike Kara, however, Galen Tyrol didn't simply sit by his old friend—she supposed they were old friends, or something like it—and talk. The Chief, spectroscope in hand, was on his hands and knees on the floor, the outer wall of the basin Sam was lying in open beside him, a haphazard handful of wires spilling on the floor. "Any change?"

"He keeps mentioning an agreement." The Chief glanced up only briefly. "Reintegration, defragmentation. Something about a pressure valve."

She sighed, nodded, pulled her notebook out of her cargo pocket. She'd been jotting down notes, tracking his rambles and commands and odd little fits of poetry. The Chief didn't think they were relevant—at least not medically, or mechanically, or however he thought of the problem with Sam's body. "Like static on a radio," he'd said last week. As he'd said it, his now-permanent grimace had grown deeper. After a lifetime as a machinist—and, of course, as a machine—he was finding simple mechanics impossible to bear.

_He might be right._

She sank into the chair, _her_ chair, now permanently stationed next to Sam's tub. "Morning, Sam." She reached into the water, clasped his hand. "Did you have sweet dreams?"

No response. "So, umm, Hoshi's team found two new kinds of fruit trees yesterday. One was amazing—the fruit tastes like a Picon fig but it comes in pods, not peels. The other was stranger, like a bluenut but red and full of bitter seeds. Baltar thinks they'll kill you if you eat 'em before they're ripe."

Sam's stare was unnerving. Kara could never decide if it was worse when he went for a long time without blinking, or when he began to blink rapidly, as though trying to speak with his eyelids.

The Chief grunted softly to himself as he clipped one of the wires that connected to the tubing at the base of Sam's skull and reattached another.

"I remember that when you and I used to imagine finding Earth, we mostly talked about eating real food again—fruits and vegetables and _steak. _But you know, it never occurred to me that they wouldn't be the same foods from back home. I'd dream about landing on a world filled with coneberries, and tackapples, and good Aerelon sweet yellow squash. The steak would be crusted in Spartan pepper, with a side of maize and mash, all just the same as if we were at the Colonial Day fair in Delphi." She closed her eyes a moment, let her mind go back, even though it was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. "The food's not bad here, but it's not the same. Let me tell ya, I don't have much that I wouldn't give if I could miraculously find a tackapple grove somewhere in this valley."

Chief tugged on a cord extending from Sam's skull to a place under the basin she couldn't see, and she heard him muttering to himself: "Frak. How am I going to get a light ether transfusion on this godsforsaken planet?"

"The gods brought us here, Chief," Kara said quietly. _They did. Or I did_. She gritted her teeth.

Sam's eyes flared open at that, and he replied as if he heard what she thought as much what she said. "You have brought humanity to its end, Kara Thrace. Proceed with amputation. A diaspora has no ending. Arrival is in motion and not in space. Pause defragmentation."

Kara scribbled frantically, trying to keep up. With her free hand, she clutched his, down in the cold water, so tightly her knuckles turned white. She asked him the question she asked every day. "Sam. Sam, when will you come back? How do I bring you back?"

"Destiny collapses in the pyramid. New command. Build the cathedral of union for lymphatic integrity. End of line. Resume defragmentation."

Galen had slid back from the basin, was exuding wariness. His brooding eyes had turned inward.

"In the pyramid… does he mean the game? Does he need exercise?" Kara's eyes were frantically scanning what she'd just written down, cursing again her own sloppy handwriting, ruthlessly shoving down her mother's voice inside her head doing the same. "The cathedral of union. Does that mean anything to you, Chief?"

He set down the spectroscope carefully. "There's… actually, there _is_ something. You remember when we landed on the algae planet—when I was trying to decode the symbols around Temple of the—the Temple of Hopes?"

Kara's face stilled. She had lost some of her mind near the Temple of the Five; it had been the site of her affair with Lee, where she'd somehow let herself believe she could have some of him and not all without going crazy. That place had been an island of recklessness in her stupid, reckless life. She'd nearly destroyed everyone she'd been trying to protect—Sam. Lee. Her own equanimity. She'd thought she could survive the poison. What had she said, to push him away? She'd believed it, whatever it was.

Oh, yes. _Marriage is a sacrament. It's not a pyramid game. You don't—you don't get do-overs, Lee_.

She bent her head, reminded herself she _still_ believed that. That actually, you didn't get do-overs even in pyramid games.

"Yeah. I remember. That temple," She cleared her throat, "almost got me killed."She closed her eyes and let Dee's even features prick behind her eyelids.

"Well. There was a script—an ancient language—around the central pillar, and all over the walls. I couldn't read it, then—just felt like I _should_ be able to. The part of me that was locked up—the, well…"

"The Cylon part."

"Yeah. I think it could read it all along. And I can remember now, what most of it said—even if some of it seems _wrong_, somehow. But, well, but the things Sam was just saying, some of it was there. 'The Temple of Union shall herald the end of the diaspora.'" The Chief's hand floated up to his throat, fell. "But I'm not sure that makes any sense."

"Why not?"

"It's just that Sam was right, what he said before. Diasporas don't have endings. They end in living in permanent exile. Everyone knows that. You'll never eat another tackapple. Even if you went back to Caprica and found one in some bunker, it wouldn't taste the same after you've spent so much time _longing _for it. We're adrift forever. We found a refuge. For our great-grandchildren—maybe—this planet will become home. But for us?" He shook his head. "We're building on top of the ruins of everything we've lost, and we've lost about everything. This isn't paradise for us. It's the gods' reparations." He cleared his throat, remembered who he was. A different side of who he was, one which required a different grammar. "God's reparations."

Kara eyes turned liquid with pity and fear as she listened to him. _Reparations? But—weren't _we_ the sinners—the Cylons and the humans, both? Or was it all just a game, planned out by the lords of Kobol—by some gods, somewhere—for ends we'll never understand? Will we ever know why any of this happened? Why I had to _die—

With the ease of long practice, she cut off that thought at the pass. Then:

"Oh, _lords_. Frak me!" She jerked her hand out of the water and surged to her feet, her notebook sliding to her feet as she did.

"What's the matter, Kara?"

Kara stared at the notebook like it might erupt in magma, and rubbed her soaking hand, the one that had been holding Samuel T. Anders', against her pants leg. All at once, she'd noticed two things:

That Sam's right hand had tightened on her left one the whole time the Chief was talking.

And that, while she wasn't looking, _her_ right hand had meticulously drawn the outline of a temple on the pad in front of her.

She leaned back her head and screamed. "I am _frakking sick of signs!"_

The Chief picked up her notebook, and for the first time in as long as about anyone could remember, he started to laugh.


	3. Control

Lee restrained his urge to bury his face in his hands, wishing he hadn't agreed to a private meeting with Hylene Fauvre at the end of an excruciatingly long quorum meeting.

"I understand your concern, Captain. I understood it the first eight times one of the captains brought it up this afternoon. So let me say one last time: when our Raptors return from scouting the surface of this planet, they'll bring full reports on the wildlife, climate, and current human populations of all of the major landmasses and we'll draw up recommendations for settlements based strictly on sustainability. There won't be a lottery. Anyone will be free to go where they want to."

Fauvre opened her mouth to insist, again, that colonists be allowed free choice, and he forestalled her. "I've made every promise I can, Hylene. Take my word or don't. I'll see you tomorrow."

Lee leaned his head against the wall behind him. Why had he chosen to hold quorum meetings in what had been the pilots' ready room? The explanation he'd given the ships' captains been that it was the only room on Galactica equipped with sufficient seating for the seventy-four members of the captains' quorum, and that Galactica was neutral territory now that three quarters of it had been decommissioned and zoned for scrapping.

But the truth was that he had chosen this room because it made him feel strangely hopeful, and more in control than he probably was. It was here where, as CAG, he'd presided over a hundred desperate briefings of people willing and well-trained to do their duties. Everything—the enemy, the mission, the objects of mourning—had been stark and clear, here.

_Getting nostalgic for the old days already, Major?_ He felt the taste of algae rising up in the back of this throat, and with it, a hint of the scent of Dee's hair. He clenched his jaw. There was too much to mourn, now. He couldn't keep track of it.

"Not sure you should be making all of those promises, Apollo." Saul Tigh, with Gaius Baltar, Caprica Six, and a Two behind him, stepped into the recently emptied room.

Lee held his calm steadily, knowing this would be no courtesy call. The sight of the Two confirmed it; this was the one still calling himself Leoben Conoy, who'd been designated by the others as their leader, much as Caprica had become the de facto leader of the Sixes.

There was a slow riot that started in him, each time he saw Conoy. He didn't know what Kara thought of it, anymore—"purgatory" and "punishment" had been her preferred nouns in the months after it had happened—but the thought of the months she'd been at his mercy made his brain hot and his heart cold.

_Steady, Lee. One problem at a time._ So he ignored Saul's jibe and gestured toward the empty chairs in front of him. "Have a seat, Colonel. Doctor, madame… Conoy." He unscrewed the top of his canteen of water, tossed some back. "What can I do for you?"

"We've heard the ships' captains are talking about scattering across the surface of this planet," Caprica lowered herself elegantly into the chair Captain Fauvre had abandoned, not deigning to notice as Baltar tucked the chair in behind her. "You can't let that happen, Major—President Adama. It would be a disaster."

_Tell me something I don't know._Lee schooled his expression to neutrality, a trick he'd picked up from Laura Roslin herself. For the thousandth time that day, he wished she were here to handle some of the burden. "I can't _stop_ that from happening, actually." That was true enough. "Many of the other ships are wholly functional, and nearly all of them have retained at least a few ship-to-surface shuttles. They don't need my permission to use them to settle elsewhere. And they won't be asking for it for much longer." He met her gaze evenly, saw the fear there. He gentled his tone. "The coalition is fragile. I can't hold it together through sheer force of will."

"We're concerned about our viability." Caprica cleared her throat.

"Because all this has happened before and—"

"I get it." Lee had no patience left for Conoy's worn aphorisms.

"It's only that we—the Cylons—aren't intermingled very well with the rest of the fleet." The fear in Caprica's eyes tugged at him, reminded him of the stakes. "They don't accept us as easily as the people on Galactica have come to. Half of those who want to leave mainly want to escape living with _us_. You know they already forced Saul out of the military, out of fear." Lee's eyes darkened sea-blue, at that, but he only nodded. "This isn't a recipe for peace and stability. If they leave, they won't forget that they fear us, that they hate us." She exchanged a wordless glance with Conoy, who gestured at her to continue, as Gaius slipped a hand over hers under the table. "I'm telling you that they'll come back—in a year or in a generation, or in ten generations—and there'll be war. Against us and everyone with us, here. War again."

Lee nodded wearily, and saw her eyes flicker. Did it surprise her that he had already made that calculation? "I know," he said tiredly. "It took all my powers of persuasion to stop the Sagittarons from leaving on day one. Then the crew of the _Thera Sita_ voted to move northward—toward a sea they saw in their satellite images—and only a supermajority vote of the quorum gave them pause. That was eleven days ago. Every day, now, there's a new motion to allow for the dissolution of the fleet, of the quorum, and of the colony here. Unless our scouting reports come back showing terrible prospects for the whole rest of the planet—which is highly doubtful—then I can't see how we'll stay whole through the end of the month."

_And there's only so long I can keep radioing Helo and Sharon that they should delay returning with their reports._

Saul scowled. "Now, wait a minute, Lee. You can't tell me there's no way to hold together the coalition here."

"I _can_tell you that the last time we were all in diaspora—fleeing Kobol—it required no fewer than thirteen separate _planets_ to maintain a fragile peace. As you all well know."

"That was no peace, Apollo, and if you took ten seconds to think through—"

"I know. I know. But there are no guarantees any way we go about this. The odds are that there _will_ be another war one day."

Baltar's squint told him that the man of science wasn't convinced by Lee's reason. "And pray tell why you haven't asked your father to intervene in the fleet's decisions?" Gaius asked coolly.

Lee could see his own internal reaction plainly on Saul's face: a hard flinch. "My father is otherwise occupied."

_Strange how quickly I've gotten used to saying that._

"We all have reasons to grieve, Major—excuse me, Mr. President." Something in Baltar's eyes told Lee that his misspeaking, unlike Caprica's, had been calculated to fluster. Lee shoved the tide of irritation welling up in him back down. "I would assume you'd agree, wouldn't you, that he shouldn't be allowed to wallow?"

Saul's eye on Lee said plainly: _Don't rise to the bait, Apollo._ Lee didn't. He kept his tone even. "He's had the weight of the human race on his shoulders for years. What he's dealing with… it's more than grief." _It's the failure of inertia. The end of purpose._

"Surely it could be impressed on him that our total annihilation is still a very real possibility—"

"He can't be reached, Baltar, it's as simple as that," Saul cut in. "Bill Adama did the work of ten men to get us this far. We'll have to do the rest ourselves."

"Oh, very well, then, if you have any actual _suggestions_, Colonel, I'm sure we'd all be delighted to hear them?"

"Build something." Conoy cut in, his unnerving gaze never veering from Lee's face. "A capital city. Something that makes people feel connected to the place, to each other. Give them some sense of shared purpose, common identity."

"And is that your idea or Sarah Porter's?" Lee's eyes narrowed at Caprica's sharp question. So _the alliance between the Twos and the Gemenese delegation is more than a rumor. What in the twelve colonies—what on_Earth _does this mean?_

Conoy didn't falter. "I'm sure my Gemenese friends would agree that a new temple would be a fitting centerpiece for the capital," he said evenly. He turned his unsettling stare on Lee once again. "We even have a project leader in mind—someone the people can rally around, someone they trust." He smiled faintly, his eyes seeming to see something in a middle distant past. "Your friend Starbuck. Who brought us here to a new Earth and saved us all."

Lee's reply was swift and instinctive. "Absolutely not." _Whatever his game is, he definitely isn't in it for Kara's sanity. She's too fragile for another round with him_. He winced inwardly. _Not that I'll be saying that to her face._

The Cylon replied as if he could hear Lee's thought. "We intend to approach Captain Thrace _herself_ with our proposal." Conoy paused deliberately. "We also intend to approach her about a statue. For the altar."

"A… statue? Of what?"

Now the chill went straight to Lee's heart, because Leoben Conoy was smiling, slowly. "Of _her_, of course. Of the savior of humanity. Of our angel. Nothing could mean more to the people of the fleet."

"Are you… _mad_?" Lee breathed, his jaw dropping. "We don't build statues of living people, Conoy. It's offensive. Actually, it's sacrilege." He steadied his voice. "I would have thought your Gemenese _friends_ would be particularly well acquainted with the chapter and verse."

"It was their idea, actually." Conoy cleared his throat. "Seeing as how Captain Thrace is not… quite alive, after all."

Gaius made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. "Yes, well, as fascinating an ongoing theological discussion of Kara Thrace's mortality continues to be around the camp—I'm sure the discussions of the temple statuary will be particularly edifying—there are bigger problems, Major. Those of us who do settle here need to decide how we're managing the land and providing for the future."

"The quorum's working on it."

"And are they qualified?" Baltar leaned across the table, and Lee didn't miss Saul's defensive posture, arms over his chest. "There hasn't been the need for a homesteading act in twenty generations in the twelve colonies. Our lands were parceled out in the early days after the exile from Kobol. More to the point, no _two_ colonies have ever had consensus on how land is to be owned and managed. Caprica allows corporate farms of unlimited size, while Canceron's farms are practically feudal, and Aerelon only outlawed sharecropping a generation ago."

Baltar's eyes were beginning to take on something of the zealous sheen Lee had grown accustomed to seeing in them. "I could go on, but the point is, we need to know _before_ we plant: does the land belong to the state? To individuals? To families? To cooperatives? Who's in charge? What happens if we're attacked by the indigenous humans? What are our alternative plans in the event of famine? And those are just a _few_ of the most pressing questions being asked each day on the commons."

"I keep telling him that we all work the land together. We grow enough, as a colony, to feed ourselves. Everyone helps." Saul's eye was steely over his set jaw. "We sink or swim together."

"And _I_keep telling the Colonel that his idea, in practice, is precisely the definition of a dictatorship, as it can only be realized through force. If _everyone's_ working the land, who will build machines? Who will uphold the law? Who will hunt and fish? And how do we choose which jobs fall to whom? If they stay put, of course." Lee was sure Gaius considered his skeptical eyebrow raise a delicate, even polite, gesture, but it made his fingers inch to become fists. _Steady. Steady, steady._

"Spit it out."

"The survivors of the twelve colonies are not farmers. By and large, they've lived white collar lives. Someone will have to lead, and someone else, enforce, if they're going to be told what work they must do, day after day. And I'm not sure how that system fits into the spirit of your supposed democracy." Baltar cleared his throat. "Mr. President," he added belatedly.

Saul harrumphed at that. "Ask him what else he wants," he grunted.

Now Lee cocked his own eyebrow. _At least the quorum pretends at negotiating._ "Yes?"

Gaius glared briefly at Saul, then shrugged. "Yes. Well. With regard to our location. While I quite agree with my… lady colleague," he nodded to Caprica, whose pressed lips colored her unimpressed at the descriptor, "that the fleet should on no account split up, I'm not entirely convinced that we've chosen the best possible location for, well, frankly, for our survival. The soil isn't ideal, and all accounts are that the rainy season here borders on monsoon weather. We're almost sixty miles from the ocean, which would be disastrous should we need to depend on fishing. And—"

"Don't bother, I've told him already." Saul shot a disgusted look at Lee. "The fleet _is _going to split up. And when the next war comes, this is the best defensive position in five hundred miles."

"Happy to see that you're not letting your decommissioning get in the way of planning our next war, how _charming_—"

"We're not leaving." This time it was Conoy interrupting.

Saul narrowed his eyes at the man, obviously not liking that Conoy was the one who'd come to his aid. "What made _you_, of all people, see sense?"

"I don't see sense. I see divine plans." Conoy's shoulders were squared and comfortable. "That song, the one you Five remembered, the one Kara used to land us here—it set _Galactica_ right here." Lee clenched his teeth at the Two's casual use of Kara's name, but he held his peace. "So exact a calculation—to land directly on the surface of a planet—defies any odds, any amount of calculating, all of our science. We are intended to be here. Here we stay." He looked at Gaius. "You can leave, but we Twos—and our Gemenese friends—will remain right here."

Caprica looked troubled, but when Gaius moved to bite back a reply, she placed a quelling hand on his arm.

"In sum, those are the concerns we all share, Lee." Her tone was earnest and calculatedly soothing. "That we stay together. How we do it. And where we do it."

He noticed that she'd dropped his supposed title altogether. _And no wonder, with how bleak my prospects as a leader are_. _Not to mention the little matter of how I was never elected._Lee would be more upset with Gaius's ham-fisted taunts about democracy if he didn't share the man's reservations about his own quasi-legal leaned forward aggressively, belying the conciliation in his words: "We've come to you for advice at how to manage these problems, Apollo. So what do you recommend we should do?"

"Write up a list of your questions and you can submit them yourself, with whatever solutions you propose, at the quorum meeting tomorrow afternoon." Lee shrugged. His irritation was abating. He was sick of this now, and in the wake of the anger, there were just nerves. "At the very least it will give everyone something new to argue about. Maybe distract them from leaving for a few more days. If you'll all excuse me, I'm hitting my rack."

He'd get a few hours of restless sleep before he got up to scan more of the reports that continually flowed onto his desk, to try to stay a step ahead of the coming brawls on the quorum floor.

"Your rack?" Gaius's brow shot up. "You're not still living in Galactica, now that we've landed on _Earth_, are you?"

Lee stilled. No one had confronted him about it yet, although he knew it was a matter of some curiosity. _How can I tell them what I keep thinking—that if I leave Galactica, I'll just keep going? I wasn't holding out hope for Earth. Everything I was hoping for is already gone. Galactica's the only home I have left._

He thought of Kara, as she'd been the last time he'd seen her—maintaining her morning vigil at Sam's side, clutching his hand in hers, her forehead pressed to his temple, whispering something in his ear. His mind had flickered, remembering coming back to Zak's grave the afternoon they'd buried him to find her kneeling there, her head on the ground.

He'd walked away then, too.

_You want to talk about seeing patterns, Conoy_, he thought. _I could tell you something about me, and jealousy, and dead men._

He looked up now, saw that the Two was watching him thoughtfully. "You should come outside, Lee. It's a beautiful world out there that she found for us." Conoy's tone was loaded with meaning Lee didn't entirely understand. But at those words, something sunken deep in his chest, which had been quietly shuddering, crystalized and emerged.

Ignoring Leoben, Lee turned to Gaius Baltar. "No. I'm not living here. I'm just looking for decent accommodations."

"A good tent is hard to find," Gaius humored him. "Now, since we're talking of delaying the dispersion of the fleet, would you allow me to suggest the possibility of an electoral campaign…?"

xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx xXx


	4. Harder

By the time she fell into her cot that night, Kara had a to-do list as long as her arm. _Let's see: tomorrow. Negotiate with Captain Jondran for the Hitei Kan's plating equipment. Ask Lee to requisition two welders from D-level. Coordinate with the centurions to see if they'll spare any laborers. _

She had dreaded this time of every day for weeks. When they'd first arrived, she'd been driven out of the larger bunk tents—though not the bars—by prying stares that were trying to reconcile Kara Thrace, Angel and Savior, with Starbuck, ace pilot and professional badass. She'd talked Helo into requisitioning her a dome tent designed to sleep four officers. For Earth at present, they were swanky digs, but she'd earned them the hardest way possible, and didn't waste time feeling guilty about it. She'd needed a place to worry at fate. Unlike her quarters on the Demetrius, this tent seemed to hold the edges of her sanity steady so that she could keep her shit together outside.

Outside her tent, where most nights someone left photographs of their dead loved ones they believed she could contact, or candles burning that miraculously hadn't burned down her home yet, or simply held hands and sang hymns together for endless hours so she couldn't sleep.

Tonight, though. It felt good to be thinking about things she could change, rather than ones she couldn't, as she was trying to fall asleep. Even if she didn't understand why she was still supposed to change anything at all. _You thought you were supposed to save him—them_, Kara corrected herself, shoving a wary, watching pair of blue eyes into the corner of her mind. _Save all of them. Get them to earth. So what if it turns out that it's harder? Harder's a way of life. You can have easy when you're dead._

_Again._

That Leoben Conoy had given her the resources to build a temple on the same day her comatose husband had suggested she do it only affirmed what she knew to her soul: this was the missing piece of her destiny. She couldn't worry about Leoben anymore, not since she'd realized that he was just a part of the strange weather of her life, a kind of dampness in the air reminding her of old injuries.

The weather didn't change anything—not the injuries, not the job.

She was settling back into exhausted contemplation of her to-do list when the flap of her tent was abruptly jerked open, and someone ducked inside. It took a long moment before her eyes adjusted enough to make out who it was. And when she did, it was who she'd been expecting for long days, had given up expecting. Those blue eyes piercing the air, military bearing only as much at ease as it ever was. Which was to say, he would have looked to most other eyes like he'd come on business—but Kara knew he probably hadn't.

_It's about time. _"What the hell are you doing here, Lee?"

Lee met her gaze easily, although he knew a mutiny brewing when he saw it. Because he did, he didn't pause long before throwing his bag down on her spare cot. "Sleeping."

_Ah. He's feeling guilty again. And afraid of what Leoben's up to. _"In two weeks, Mr. President couldn't scare up the connections to land himself his own tent?"

Lee's small smirk was his way of letting her know he wasn't going to be riled. "Who do you think gave this one to Helo for you? Anyway, I have somewhere to stay." He knelt and methodically spread out his sleeping bag on the low cot four feet from hers—untie, untie, corner, corner, _roll_—proving as usual that you could take Lee Adama out of the military, but you most definitely could not take the military out of Lee Adama. "Namely here."

She had seen the leash he kept on his self-control, had seen it slacken and tauten. But he never dropped it altogether. She heard, faintly, the sound of an elemental yell erupting over a dark hillside on New Caprica, welling up from a deep pocket of her memory. _Almost never. _

Testing his control had long since become a favorite pasttime, because where Lee couldn't let anyone see him _want_, Kara couldn't let anyone see her care. Naturally: forcing him to let on that he wanted her had been the perfect way of showing she didn't care. It was so tempting—all of the pleasure, none of the guilt. The temptation of temptation—to be in his proximity, to draw deeply on the pleasure of goading him, but to not give in to it. She could feel the blood pounding in her throat and wrists, suddenly. Suddenly, she felt alive again.

_Lee._

"Mmm. I don't think you're gonna like renting from me, Apollo. First month's rent is three years continuous service on a battlestar."

A raised eyebrow, as if he were saying, _What's your game, Starbuck?_, and damn if that wasn't good for a heart she hadn't realized was lonely for it. "Paid it," he offered.

"Perfect. Security deposit's a daily hot oil massage for your landlady." Reckless grin never faltering, she watched him, watched the quick gleam flicker across his eyes before he smothered it, felt her first flash of electric heat in weeks. "Garbage pickup is never. Oh, yeah, and heat and electricity are definitely _not_ included."

He didn't crack a smile, this time, which, predictably, made her laugh. God, what was it about him? When was the last time she'd laughed? "On the flip side, the place is an absolute steal; I have a feeling property value around here is about to _skyrocket_."

Lee lowered himself heavily to the cot, and she noticed, as he did, just how tired he seemed. Had he just come from speaking fruitlessly with his father, coming up against the Old Man's utter withdrawal? From meeting with the ship captains, whose talk of scattering was already sweeping the camp? From looking at the sky and remembering when the arrow of Apollo had let them see earth from Kobol and they'd dreamed of days like this—days they hadn't known would be like this—wordlessly, uncertainly, together?

Was he realizing that life on Earth, like everything else they'd ever shared, had turned out to be both more and less than the prospect of it had been?

When he spoke, it was a riddle—or perhaps it only seemed that way to her, because she was so used to hearing the riddes underlying the things he said to her. They had had their own code for far too long.

This was one she was terrified to decipher.

"Kara. I'm staying with you. Until I can't anymore."

The laughter died in her eyes. _Oh, gods, what did I let slip? What did he see? _

And then she finally took the time to think about what it meant that he had brought his pack with him, had rolled out his sleeping bag. About whether she wanted him to stay. The answer—the potency of it—jolted her. _I should make him go, _she thought. _Anything else is selfish._

But, "So you gonna tell me bedtime stories?" she heard herself say.

Some of the tiredness and the tension seemed to melt off Lee, at that. He rolled himself into his sleeping bag and closed his eyes. "There once was a world-class Viper pilot, callsign 'Wiseass', who remembered an old song at just the right moment," and here his tone softened and tripped a loosening in the veins and arteries in her chest so that everything was suddenly unconstricted, "and against all odds saved the human race from endless drifting in the dark infinity of space. Got seventeen separate cocktails named after her in two weeks' time."

"No good. I've heard that one before." Kara blinked back her quick, completely irrational tears. "It ends with her costar, a pilot-turned-politician—callsign Choirboy—becoming a glorified resource allocation specialist on a planet no one's ever even heard of. Just plain boring."

Lee finally did laugh, at that, and there wasn't even any bitterness in it. She felt the coiled spring wrapped around her guts ease a little, hearing it. _It'll be easier to leave if I know he can still laugh. That I didn't take that away._

_That he survived, after all._

"So what are _you_ gonna do to occupy your time on this boring planet you found for us? Seeing as how the need for high-stakes unconventional military strategy around here is at an all-time low…"

"I've got a plan." Kara swung her arms around her chest, not quite willing to tell Lee that it was more like a calling—more like the desperate tugging that had plagued her on the Demetrius. An urgent summons.

"Should I be worried?"

_Yes._ _They're going to call me back, at the end of it, Lee. I can't stay. _"No. Nothing dangerous." She bit her lip, knew he knew that she was lying, then took the plunge with a truth that hid the lie. "I'm gonna build a temple, for everyone. And—I'm gonna save Sam."

With that, she turned onto her side to face the tent wall, hitched her sleeping bag up. And so she didn't see, only felt Lee absorbing her blow. Felt it, and then heard it, too; in the dark, she thought she heard him swallow, hard—once, and again. "Conoy put you up to it?"

"No. It was Sam's idea. And the Chief's." _And the gods'. _

"There's something you're not telling me." She squeezed her eyes shut, didn't turn around. "Kara. Normally I don't ask. You know—you know how much I don't ask. But if something's happening—if something's going to happen to you… There are things we need to say—"

"No. Gods, Lee." She turned, now, but still didn't look at him. Stared at the ceiling of the tent, tried to stare past it, to hold onto the things that were out there, in the universe, that she knew. She reminded herself of the most pressing of them: _Sometimes poison sets in so deep that you can't cut it out without cutting out vital organs. _

_You could still destroy him._

"No, I… there's nothing to say."

"Fine." His sigh reminded her that he, too, had been deciphering her codes for a long time. "Just—give me some warning."

She nodded. _Thanks for the reprieve, Lee. _"You always were a gentleman, Apollo." She paused, regained herself. "Too much of one, from what I hear. Why the hell haven't you commandeered all the ships in the fleet and frakking _forced_ everyone to stay put?"

"Under what authority? I'm unelected. Hell, I'm untrained—it's my first year in politics." He was reciting words he'd told himself a thousand times, she could tell. "Even if I'd been voted in unanimously, the will of the people—"

He was interrupted by her pillow soaring across the room at him. "Gods, Lee. Just. _Shut. Up._" Another pillow, this one covered with something coarse. "Lords! It's like you can't learn! It's like you seriously can't be _taught_ that good intentions don't yield good results, like you didn't see that the _will of the people_ was an internment camp on New Caprica!"

"Did you—Kara, did you just actually start a pillow fight with me?"

"Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, at the New Earth Coliseum, Lee 'Vox Populi Vox Dei' Adama will read aloud to us from a book of ethics and we will all be _so wise_ and our _souls_ will be so _safe_ that we won't even hear the clangs of civil war coming from the hills—"

"What do you want me to do?" Lee gritted, swinging to sit up in his bunk. "Because I'm getting sick of hearing about all the problems—I _see_ all the problems! I'm not blind! Sometimes I think I see ten times more of them than anyone else even bothers to look for! Solutions, Kara. Give me something that will let me keep everything together."

"Well, Lee. Let's see. Your father has… mustered out. Saul resigned his commission." She didn't linger on that sore point, which would have forced both of them to think about the grim anti-Cylon protests that had led Saul to eject himself from the military he'd served for forty years in order to keep the peace. "That leaves… who's that again, who's third in command of the colonial fleet? Oh, right. Major Leland J. Adama."

"I retired."

"So resume your commission!"

"What's wrong with Helo's command?"

She shot him an incredulous look. "You seriously think _Helo _is going to agree to hold civilians against their will? He's the only person in camp with less common sense than you. No, if someone's going to get this done, it's going to have to be you, Major. Helo will live with it if it's by the book."

"But that's the least of it. I'm interim president. You don't get to be president _and_ commander. Civilian control of the military is a basic tenet of democratic government. If you mix the two…"

"You think the old man didn't mix it up? If he didn't, why's he shacked up on a hillside with that particular gravestone?" Kara rolled her eyes skyward. "Look, you know I don't have much invested in all the political theory big idea crap that you do. Every kind of government is just another kind of '-ism' that lets us get by for a while. Survival, Lee. It's still the name of the game. You can't just throw up your hands now and quit worrying about it. What would—" She pressed her lips together before the words _What would Laura say_? could emerge from them. She didn't want to use the dead woman's memory; it still hurt too much. No: she didn't want to be the kind of person who frakking _moralized_ this way, in the first place.

She knew that he heard Laura's name in the silence, because he said, quietly, "She'd tell me to do the smart thing, not the right thing." He rubbed his eyes tiredly. "That's what we were… working on, I guess."

"The smart thing, Lee. You have to keep everyone together, and you need control of all the ships to do it. You can do it. You can say…" She paused to think.

"That our tylium shortage justifies consolidating our resources to give priority to the general survival of the people of the Twelve Colonies and our technology and culture."

"Yes! Perfect." Then his words hit her. "Oh, gods. Lee—that's… that's true, isn't it? There's no tylium?"

Lee leaned forward, and she watched his hand begin to reach across the space between them, then fall. "Negative in this system. Fourteen ships out scouring nearby sectors."

She nodded, slowly. "How long do we have?"

Lee sighed, reached into his bag, pulled out a folder. "Page five. It's classified." He handed it to her.

_Oh, gods… _Inside, there were lists of machines to be turned off, in order of priority. Dishwashing, stoves, laundry, hot water in the showers—all those were to be suspended _tomorrow_. Water could be heated the old-fashioned way—a fire started with sticks.

"You'd better have serious manpower guarding the tylium reserves," she muttered, flipping the page. Water purifiers, land cruisers, equipment for new building construction, electrical lighting in public meeting rooms—they all had secondary priority that would last another few months.

The bulk of the reserves, it seemed, were being saved for a handful of big-ticket causes: Maintaining the functioning of a few Raptors to allow for scouting and long-distance movement. Computer mainframes, while records were being moved offline. The rebel base star and Galactica's defense systems, while threat of a further attack still lingered as a possibility, however remote. And the centurions themselves, whose sentience was unfortunately reliant on this very particular kind of fuel.

"The centurions will die," she muttered. And then she burst.

"Sam—Lee, Sam needs Galactica's life support to stay alive. _Sam_ will die! We can't let that happen. You can't shut off Galactica!"

And just like that, suddenly they were back on New Caprica, and he was miles above her, on the Pegasus, and she was begging for Sam's life. But this time there was no pride to swallow; most of her pride had been burned with her body on the Cylon earth. And this time, Lee was a veteran of hearing this plea, had heard variations of it—_I choose Sam—_a hundred times over the course of a long year. And so he knew that there was actually no limit to the number of times she could shatter this particular bone in his chest, and also that it would never heal, so he didn't worry much about it as he felt it shatter again.

The guilt and the betrayal remained, too. They were a dark heavy curtain that hung in the air between them. It had been there since long before New Caprica, but both of them had grown so used to navigating around it that they hardly saw it anymore-like miners who'd grown used to semi-darkness and stooping whenever they attempted nearness.

"I know." His tone was patient. _He sees all the problems before anyone else. He sees more of them. _"Life has priority, Kara. That's what we'll work to save. The basic necessities—_and _the centurions—and, of course, Sam. So build your temple fast. Time's running out for heavy masonry equipment."

She blew out a breath. _Harder. Always harder._ "I don't think I'm going to like having you as a tenant. Nothing but bad news."

He snorted. "Yeah, well I don't think I'm going to like having you as my special ops leader when I commandeer 74 ships in three days' time, but we don't always get we want, do we?"

She grinned, at that. Finally. Something easy. "You'll like it, Choirboy."

She laid awake and listened to him laying awake for a while, but her strength to continue torturing herself failed her, finally, and she slept. For some reason, it was the first night since they'd landed on Earth that she _didn't_ dream of the lights going out.

When Lee woke up and found Kara had crawled in beside him sometime during the night and was pressed all along his back, he was proud of himself on two counts. One, he only laid there a few moments to savor the feeling. And two, he didn't dwell too much, when he slipped quietly out of her tent at dawn, on poetic justice.


	5. Wireless

**This was a rough one; hurt to write it. But now all the building blocks of the story are in place... **

**-Penny**

**xxx**

"Shit! _Get down get down get down_. They're coming!"

Olivia Valerii—as she'd decided to call herself once she needed a name—followed orders and _got down_ as a spray of bullets ripped into the hull of the _Argo Navis_ over her head. This was one of the last three ships to be seized by Lee Adama's order, and one of only a handful to put up any resistance. She was glad to be on it; glad to be seeing some action.

Olivia was one of the many Eights who had eagerly joined up as soon as Saul and Ellen Tigh had issued a call for a Cylon militia. The Tighs wanted to ensure they had a defense against the increasingly violent anti-Cylon faction of the humans. Olivia hadn't had any altercations with humans—well, nothing too bad—but she also hadn't even had to think about whether to enlist. She had felt like a soldier almost since she'd first stepped out of a birth basin, what with Sharon Agathon and Sharon Valerii's memories swimming around in her skull.

Those memories might be what was spooking her just now, though. In both cases, the memories cut off abruptly with gunfire.

"Frak!" The commentary was from Sharon Agathon herself as she shepherded them into _Argo Navis_'s state room. Athena was commanding this unit, made up of three Twos and two Sixes with Olivia as the only other Eight. That was by Athena's orders. Olivia got it: Eights were verboten, thanks to Boomer's legacy. Athena'd built her whole life, her family and her sense of self, around keeping her distance from the rest of them.

_And she probably thinks she's the only one who feels that way. _

"OK. Intel says nine humans, including Captain Markson, maintaining defensive positions. Remember that we're here only to neutralize the threat of deadly force from civilian resisters—preferably through peaceful means." She left unsaid that it was only a preference, not an order. "Twos, you're on: sweep the engine room and disable the FTL drive. Control of the tylium reserve is paramount."

"Roger that," a particularly grim Two who Olivia had frakked a few times after they'd first joined the humans—Cal Connolly, that was his name, his eyes looked something like Karl Agathon's if you squinted—set off down the hall, the other Twos hot on his heels.

"Isis," Athena turned to one the Sixes, "rendezvous with the guards at the entrance to set up a sentry here, and then the two of you," she nodded at the other Six, "will scout for other ways into this place that aren't on the registered blueprints."

Sixes. They understood revolutionary tactics, didn't waste time with questions, and only fluidly moved to complete their business. Terrifying. Olivia considered Isis a friend—well, a friendly acquaintance—but as a rule, she avoided Sixes like nothing else. They weren't the reason her heart was pounding just now, though.

"And me?" she asked Athena breathlessly. She'd never been alone with this woman before—this woman whose life played in Olivia's imagination like favorite scenes from a novel she'd read a hundred times.

"You and I," Sharon Agathon's mouth was purposeful, "are storming the flight deck."

**xxx**

"Starbuck. Damage report," Helo snapped at Kara as she entered the CIC. He was running on nerves, the combination of a mission he didn't support and his wife's dangerous role in carrying it out a half mile away from him.

"Those two civilian casualties aboard the _Calliope_ are confirmed. That's four total. We have Captain Trebol in custody aboard the Astral Queen. She's demanding an attorney." Starbuck's tone said plainly that she thought Eliot Trebol should have thought of her legal situation before she opened fire on the colonial military. "Seelix's team has taken control of the _Kodiak_. Their FTL drives were fully spooled. She shut 'em down about ten seconds before they would have jumped."

"So only two." The _Greenleaf_ and the _Hitei Kan_ had surged into the air and jumped almost as soon as the coordinate strike had begun, but the lack of warning meant that they had jumped with only perhaps ninety people aboard both ships—albeit with a full eighth of the fleet's tylium.

Wherever they'd gone, they were off-planet. But Helo and Starbuck both understood they'd be back shortly. The draw of New Earth would be too strong for them to resist.

And when they returned, phase two of Lee's plan would begin.

"Only two. And only one ship still in revolt—waiting for Athena to report from the _Argo Navis_. Perimeter reports say her team has commenced operations inside. All other ships are locked down, with engine and FTL capacity disabled." Kara risked a glance across the table at Lee, who'd been listening the whole time; he'd broken off his intent conversation with four members of the Captain's Quorum who'd aided in the planning as she'd walked in.

"Good work, Starbuck," he said briefly, before turning back to the captains and their quiet, urgent murmurs.

"Aye aye, Commander," she muttered, ignoring Helo's scowl at the reminder of Apollo's having pulled rank so effectively.

She didn't, however, ignore his gaze fixed on the DRADIS. At Kara's suggestion, they'd jammed the regular wireless channels, so that only ship-to-ship communication was functional. Consequently, each of the unit commanders had been equipped with a tracking device so they could send off alarm signals during ops and be locatable in event of emergency.

Minute movements within a ship weren't visible on it, though. Sharon's light hadn't moved in hours.

"She'll be OK."

"I know."

"We need her to rendezvous with the Cylon militia—to make sure they don't turn on us—"

"I _know_."

"I'm just saying, the fact that she's with other Cylons—"

"That's your fear talking, not mine, Starbuck." Helo's fist came down harder than he intended on the command position table. "I've trusted her loyalty from the beginning. I'm worried about the humans on _Argo Navis_. I'm worried for her _life_."

"Gods, I get it. You didn't follow me. I meant—her team. You don't have to be worried about the _other_ Cylons. They're with us, now. They'll treat her right." Kara thought of a doodle she'd pressed into Athena's hands this morning—a whimsical little thing that had made free use of a dozen or more toasters—and grinned. Athena was unlikely to have found that drawing particularly funny. But Kara was starting to feel downright affectionate toward the toasters among the fleet. _Because they're like me. They don't belong, but they keep fighting._

"I hope so." He cast her a sidelong glance. "Apollo didn't handle _your_ absence that well."

The smile was wiped off her face. "That's none of your business."

"Yeah. That's what I thought. But then we got the reports of gunshots aboard the _Calliope_. And then he went cold and gave me the job of keeping the entire CIC _silent_ until you wired in with a sitrep. So you could say the commander sort of made it my business."

Kara flicked her eyes back to the commander-president, saw what she'd already felt, that he was watching her. He didn't look away, just kept talking quietly, gesturing to the captains. She picked up snatches of what he was saying. "…_otherwise will have to announce it as a_…_just guessing at the electoral consequences…_"

Not about her, then.

"This isn't something you can fix, Helo. Leave it alone."

"Don't give me that crap. We've known each other too long." Helo took his eyes off the DRADIS long enough to look at her reproachfully. "I was also the one to sign the requisition order for that bed he had delivered to your tent three days ago, Kara," Helo was intent now, "and I know it's the same old story. I can see it on your face. You're terrified. He stirs up every frakked-up feeling you've ever had. Every time he comes around, it's some other reckless stunt from you. So I need you to promise me that this time, you won't do something crazy just 'cause Apollo's screwing up your steady."

"I'm already married. I already died, for that matter. Not a lot of wiggle room left for crazy." Kara deliberately kept her tone flippant. Helo just shook his head at her.

"Speaking of your marriage…you sure it's a good idea to be shacking up with the prez?"

"We aren't…"

His brow shot up. "Is it the politics, then? Because I gotta tell you…"

"The _what_?"

"Shit. You seriously haven't done the math, have you?" Karl was flustered. He looked down at the landing site map spread out on the table in front of him for a long moment, debated how much to tell her, decided _all_. "Here's what they're saying, Starbuck: Kara Thrace, Savior of Humanity, shacked up with the young president to shore up his shaky administration, so that opposing Apollo means opposing salvation. Or else: the gods have chosen Lee Adama's presidency, which you can tell because our angel, Kara Thrace, has cast her lot with his. Or Lee Adama is callously using said angel to hold onto his own power. Or…."

"_I get it_." Kara's face really was terrified, now. "Idiots. They really think it's a strategy."

"His, yours, or the gods'. The Gemenese and the Twos, in particular, seem fond of the story. Yeah."

"And it really… I mean, do you think it's really helping Lee?"

He just laughed. "Always would've thought you'd make a terrible political wife, Starbuck."

Kara had never been able to tame her chuckles when she was the most terrified, and now was not an exception. _Gods, me, a political…. _At the word "wife," her grin faded again. "It's for me, Helo. That's he's staying with me, I mean. It's not for him. And you don't have to worry. "

Seeing her troubled expression, Lee broke away from the captain's huddle, ignoring the irritated gesture of Hylene Fauvre. He put a hand on Kara's arm without seeming to notice doing it. "What's the sitrep on the _Argo Navis_?"

"No news there. But Lee," Kara's eyes were mocking as she looked up at him, "how do you respond to reports that you're _using_ me to further your political career?"

Lee raised a brow toward Helo. "So you finally heard," he murmured. "Don't worry, the only thing _useful_ about you is your gift for strategy. I still can't believe that move with the parachuters worked… I swear, you were born under some kind of crackpot star—"

"_DRADIS contact!_" Hoshi's voice broke in. "One of the panic alarms… Point-four clicks south-southwest." He ran his eyes over the scanner reports, found the code, spoke Karl Agathon's worst fears. "It's Athena."

When Helo broke out of the CIC at a run, neither Kara nor Lee tried to stop him.

**xxx**

Olivia's ears were ringing. Where had the gunshots come from? Who was hit?

As Olivia saw Sharon Agathon hit the ground, red fluid—_blood_, _we call it blood, now_—spilling out of her left side, she didn't pause to think, only reacted. Spinning in the direction of the shot, she pulled her gun straight out from her shoulder, with deadly steadiness, straight at the shocked Captain Simpson Markson's face.

And she _fired_.

She didn't need to check his pulse to see he was dead. She ran to the control panel, having already scanned the ship's mechanical systems into her memory in ops prep, and slammed the button she knew would shut and lock the flight deck doors.

_Wireless_. _Need to wire for help_. She glanced around quickly, finding that the set had been dislodged from the location assigned it in the blueprints. "Shit. I don't have time for this. Where the frak is it?"

"Olivia."

"Hang on, Sharon. Just hang on." Olivia was dropping to her knees beside Athena even as her eyes were frantically scanning the room for comm links. _Why, why, did we scramble all the handhelds? This thing clipped to my belt is frakking useless._

She finally let herself look down at her fellow Eight, on the ground. "Oh, frak."

She went back to searching for the link.

Athena's face had already gone pale, and so had her hands. She was losing—losing _blood_ fast. "Get me a compress. Olivia! _Now_." She bit out of the words, and Olivia could hear her strain. It made her heart clench with pity.

Olivia sighed. "We both know there's no point, Sharon."

"_Get it now_."

"You've already lost," Olivia let her eyes scan, and then, as they were built to do, measure, "just under two liters of blood. Even if I start stanching now… statistically speaking, you've got less than a .5% chance of survival. Looking for a comm device so I can call for backup before _I _get attacked is a better use of my time."

"Olivia! This is not a suggestion! It's a command!" Athena was hoarsely choking, her voice barely above a whisper. It was taking Athena everything she had left to muster the words.

"SOPs say that a wound that impairs cognitive function is grounds for suspension of rank. And given the loss of blood to your brain…" She was patting down Markson, now, felt a bulge against his chest. _Aha._ "Found it!"

"Olivia. You're not… a… toaster. _Please_."

Olivia watched as Athena's eyes began to flutter closed, and then was struck by a horrible idea. _Can this really be so easy? Am I dreaming?_ _Have I dreamed it before? _"No. I'm not."

She lifted the dog tags off of her own neck, knelt beside Athena, and swiftly, methodically, switched them with hers. _Why does it feel like I've done this before? Feel strangely… right? _

Athena was still, now, on the ground, forever beyond words. Olivia spoke them, anyway. "May God's rest find you," she whispered.

She then noted the scar on Athena's wrist—_must have plugged herself into one of these herself, at one point_—and pulled out her belt knife, slicing a hole into her left arm and shoving the comm link into it. _Saves on tylium use, anyway_, she thought.

For the moment, she looked away from Sharon Agathon's corpse, afraid it would break her will to carry on.

"Galactica," Olivia spoke into the comm calmly, felt it pulsing in her veins, in her blood, suddenly her very real, very human-feeling _blood_, "this is Athena. We have control of the _Argo Navis_." She paused, heard cheering erupting in the Galactica CIC, let it wash over her. _I'm the hero, now_. _I'm the most human one of us_. She dared a glance back at Athena, at her chalky face, at the red puddle that had poured from her. "Affirmative. I have to report two casualties…Yes, Captain Markson. And…" Her voice broke for the first time, and she swallowed hard. "And Olivia Valerii…"

She closed her eyes for a long moment and said another prayer of remembrance.

And then she stooped next to Athena, began feeling through her pockets. Ah—a little photo of Hera. _My daughter. _Her wedding band. _Fits perfectly_. A drawing of Sharon running into a ship with a chain of toasters tied to either wrist, a scribbled note on it reading "Good hunting, Athena. But don't forget you have to plug your team in first. –Starbuck."

_That's not me anymore. Athena was right. I'm _not_ a toaster._

"Roger that, Galactica. All clear for reinforcements."

She let all her memories—Sharon Agathon's memories—wash fully into her brain, stopped trying to hold them at bay, convince herself they weren't really hers.

Then she stood up, retreating from the pool of blood streaming around the dead woman on the floor. She brightened as a macabre little joke occurred to her.

"Looks like _I'm_ the one who found the tomb of Athena this time."

A pounding began on the flight deck door she'd sealed, and she moved swiftly to the control panel to allow her husband inside.


	6. The Hail Storm

It was twenty minutes after the pulsing on the hull began that Kara forced Lee to admit that there was no hail storm: Galactica was under siege by angry people with handfuls of rocks. He could have verified it sooner if they hadn't disassembled the video surveillance cameras on the exterior two days before in order to save on tylium.

"We knew they wouldn't be happy about this." Petty Officer Davis leaned forward on her platform desk across the CIC. Her tone married patience and pragmatism. "Shall I order out the Marines to settle the crowd, Commander Adama?"

She was talking to Lee, but looking at Kara, and her eyes were almost pleading. She had, after all, made this request to Lee twice already. "No, Major Adama won't be doing the sensible thing." Kara rolled her eyes. "He's going to wait for the light of pure reason to calm those couple dozen angry reactionaries out there. They'll hear him speak, and all at once, they'll stop burning him in effigy and start toasting to the sheer _wisdom_ of his having disabled the launch keys of every ship in the fleet."

Lee met the mocking glint of her eyes with steel in his. "I have to try. I know you don't understand."

It was true. Kara didn't understand his plan. If she were to draw up her survey of Lee's ethical interior, it would look something like the bluffs of the Great Canyon on Scorpia. You saw him coming—hell, you saw him from space—and he still surprised the hell out of you. Unfathomably vast, unknowably deep, undeniably rigid.

Still, she followed on his heels as he strode to the exit to call off the guards blockading the entrance. He was going to _speak to the people_. Her dread at this plan was all-consuming. Sure, they were just throwing rocks, but what if someone among them had a gun? Even rocks could wound. She flung her shades over her face just as the door was opening, to retain vision in the harsh light of the sun. On the stair platform, she moved to flank Lee. She stood at the ready, as though she were a member of the president's Public Guard detail.

Standing just slightly behind him, she didn't see the expression on his face—and was relieved he didn't turn around to see the horror on hers—when they found that there was a crowd not of dozens, but of hundreds, maybe over a thousand, teeming outside Galactica, spewing invective. They didn't stop hurling those rocks when they saw Lee.

Lee was patient. When had he become this patient? He held up his hands, and bowed his head toward them, allowing them to yell their fill. When the crowd, at last, subsided, only then did he begin to speak.

When he did, he shocked Kara again.

"Fellow citizens. You know by now that my administration has disabled the flight capacity of all the major vehicles of the fleet. I'd like to take a minute to explain to you, in my own words, why I decided on this course of action."

_Good gods_, Kara thought, _he sounds just like Laura. Patience _and _plain talk? From Lee Adama? I never thought I'd see the day._

But then, she hadn't wanted to. Lee's fits of recklessness were one of the things that showed their souls were twin.

"First, and most importantly," Lee's microphone picked up his voice suddenly, and he stopped shouting, "our resources are very limited. As you all know, no new tylium reserves have been found in over a year, and our scouting of the nearby sectors has uncovered no leads. For now, we're operating on the premise that we'll soon be without most of the technological conveniences that even the poorest of us has always enjoyed. Machines have cleaned our water, built our buildings, transported us from place to place. They've scanned our blood and bones and organs so we knew how to heal ourselves. They've allowed us to communicate over long distances and, perhaps most importantly, they've been our home for the last four years."

It was as if the air suddenly got colder, to see the heat subside from the crowd so swiftly.

"This means, in purely practical terms, that we're at the beginning of a new age. Without these mechanical resources, it's my belief that we will face quite a few difficulties in the coming weeks, months, and yes, years. Famine, water shortages, poor shelter, and disease will threaten us. But I believe that—together—we can beat our odds. Remaining united allows us to conserve our material resources, make effective plans, and lean on each other for the spiritual strength we'll need as we continue to fight to ensure our survival.

"Secondly," Lee took a breath, audibly steeling himself, "I undertook this course out of solidarity with our Cylon friends, who—"

Jeers roared from the crowd again, as one. These people, who had been raptly listening—Kara had even seen a few people nod, and shove hands that had been full of rocks in their pockets—turned on him at just his use of the _word_ Cylon, before "friend" was even past his lips.

"Our Cylon _friends_," Lee continued firmly, holding up his hands compassionately, looking like a conductor directing their roar rather than a speaker enduring it, "who joined their cause to ours, have subsumed their government within ours, and without whom we could never have made it here. To Earth."

"We wouldna needed to find _Earth_ if it hadn't been for _them!" _yelled a man, better-dressed than most here, his eyes bright with anger, hands clenched in fists. A rumble of solidarity crashed behind him.

"True. But the origin of our tragic history with the Cylons didn't begin with the recent destruction of the twelve colonies. It dates back as far as our history does—to Kobol, when another generation of Cylons and humans made war against each other—to before that. Which wars were begun by humans? Which by Cylons? What responsibilities do we have to our sentient, autonomous creations? Which do they have, to us?"

Kara could see in Lee's eyes the moment he realized that there was a bit of his father speaking in him, too, just at this moment. His shoulders tensed, then squared; his jaw hardened.

"I only know one thing. Separation, in the past, has always led us right back to what destroyed us four years ago. To hatred, to plotting, and then to bloodbaths. To genocide. To the quest to wipe one another off the face of the universe. This time _must_ be different. If we fail to learn the lessons of history, all of this that has happened before will happen again. And again. And again. Would you wish our fate on your children? On your one-thousand-times-great-grandchildren?"

Lee heaved a deep breath, and Kara saw the crowd take it with them. _Gods, I'll have to eat my words_, she realized. _This is actually working. _"So. This time, we won't separate. This time, we must be better than our ancestors. We must find a way," Lee paused significantly, "to _live together_."

That roar again, rushing up and around them, threatening to swallow Lee whole. Though it was quieter this time, Kara's hands slid upwards, wanting to cover her ears. She gritted her teeth and kept them at her sides. "Reel 'em back in!" she hissed at Lee's back. A slight tensing of his shoulders told her he'd heard her.

"Third. _Third. _Third—listen, now, this is too important to shout through! Third, we needed to hold onto these ships—their metal—for another reason. Our development commissions are beginning to draw up plans for our city, here. Because we don't have the mechanical resources to mine for new metals—we don't have the tylium for them—we need to convert our ships, our ships that have been our homes for so long, into new homes. Our ships—our homes—must become the nails, the railings, and the window frames, the doors and doorknobs and the _walls_ of our new civilization."

Kara fought the urge, now that the tension had ebbed from the crowd, to move closer to Lee, both because it would look overly protective, to his audience, but also because it would betray to Lee her intense feeling of protectiveness.

_Just let one person throw a frakking rock at him._ She wasn't relaxing her guard.

"We lost five lives today, human and Cylon, civilian and military, on the side of union and on the side of rebellion. But I believe that we have secured all our lives. Together, we will build a new world here. Together, we'll plant gardens on the ashes of our sad history. We'll fight—together—and we'll thrive—together. Thank you."

Lee moved to return to the interior of Galactica, but a high-pitched cry, its accent unmistakably Gemenese, froze him in his tracks. "Kara Thrace! What did the gods tell you about this place when they sent you here?"

Buried inside every way that Lee and Kara were exactly alike, there was a way in which they were exactly opposite, and that, too, was the nature of their souls' twinning. Where Kara was baffled by the public Lee but could play his private self like a fiddle, Lee was mystified only by the private Kara. Kara's public persona was clear as glass. If he had this circumstance explained to him in its barest details, he could have predicted what Kara would do next from almost the moment he met her.

She was going to tell them what to do—lead them home. Again. And not kindly, because she was, herself, so afraid.

Kara's hands started to shake. He saw it—sensed it—reached for one, but she clasped them quickly behind her back, as though she were only standing at attention. "The gods…" Her eyes flicked around, a touch wildly. "The gods chose this place—for a reason."

If he were to draw up his survey of Kara's interior, it would follow something like the shape and path of the Leto River which had cut the Great Canyon on Scorpia. All twists and raging current and rushing rapids, jagged rocks and changeable depths. But always, inexorably, tugging toward the ocean.

She tugged now. "They came to me again. The gods. Because they want us to—like Lee, er, like President Adama said, they want us to find a way to work together, to live together. They told me to build a temple. A Temple of Unity. One where we can all worship in the way we choose, in the same place—where we can read the scrolls together, or pray to the one god, if we choose, or where agnostics can reflect in the presence of other people. Because—that's what this has all been about. Fellowship. Coming to understand each other. The—the best things about community."

Lee watched her fingers unclench and smiled. _Here it comes._ Her tone picked up speed and confidence.

"So you can throw rocks. You can yell at people who put their lives on the line for your survival. You can demand to go your own way, demand to carry your grudges against the people that you're leaving behind with you. But we _will not let go_. Hear it now—and those two ships that jumped away earlier, they can hear it, too, if any of you have contact with them—we will not let go, and when rocks are thrown at us, we will hold on even tighter. This is not about you, or your _grievances_, or your _rights_. This is about fellowship. About not just survival, but a survival we can be proud of—one based on loving each other, despite all the reasons why all of us don't deserve it."

Lee did grab her hand, then, as a new shout went up. He'd heard people chanting her name before—well, chanting _Starbuck_—but there was something pure, and primal, and electrifying, as they began this time to shout _Kar-a-Thrace, Kar-a-Thrace, Kar-a-Thrace…_

But her eyes had that wide, hunted look again, and it hurt to look at it, so he stepped in front of her once more. "One last promise!" he interrupted their chant. "While construction begins on the temple, we'll start work to devise the groundwork for a new constitution. Everyone's invited to be a part of that conversation. So when the temple's completed, we'll be ready to have our first election on Earth."

They didn't chant _his_ name, but he hadn't come expecting miracles.

Lee waved, then tugged Kara's hand back in through the doorway, sealing them up inside the safe confines of Galactica. "We're putting guards on our tent tonight," was all he said.

She nodded mutely, and followed him back to the CIC so she could check on Sam.


	7. Liars

**_A/N: Two chapters at once today-really one mega chapter, broken up to make it easier to read. Headed to some big revelations in the *next* two chapters. Then into the Temple of Unity, and then...! I've been stewing this plot in the crockpot of my brain for so long-I'm really excited to share._**

**_Thanks for all the feedback! It makes this such a pleasure._**

**_-Penny_**

_Four weeks later_

Olivia Valerii shepherded Hera into daycare down in what had been Dogsville, on Galactica's hangar deck. She hadn't known what to expect when she'd taken up Sharon Agathon's schedule, how little time there was in it for parenting: the training, the recon missions, the meetings with military and civilian officials to coordinate settlement operations… And she could only keep skipping out on all of it for so long.

But by God, she was sick of it. She had thought this life would feel like coming home. And not only for her. She'd also thought that her decision would save Sharon Agathon's husband and daughter from pain and grief—that it would save _their _home.

She was realizing, though, that she hadn't really thought about it at all. Because eighteen days in, the guilt was destroying her.

"Don' go, VeeVee!" Hera grabbed her leg. _That_ had been an unexpected complication; Hera knew her mother at a glance the way that most Cylons needed support—mutual connection to a basestar or network device—to recognize each other as individuals. What _was _this child? Neither human nor Cylon gifts accounted for her.

Hera had been strangely unfazed by her mother's disappearance, but Olivia supposed her childish fantasy life accounted for it. The little girl happily talked about her Mama as if she were still present. "VeeVee, Mama said I can't go outside today, it's too rainy"; "Mama got a new shirt and it's blue like yours, VeeVee…" She just kept hoping Karl didn't hear her mixing her mothers; he would only buy her lame explanations about "VeeVee" for so long.

Now, though, Hera wanted her VeeVee to stay at the nursery. Every day it was the same; she was terrified to be dropped off, but then didn't want to leave by the time VeeVee got back. That was frustrating as well as comforting, on both ends. "Shhh, sweetie, I'll be back in a few hours. Until then, have fun with Noel and Sacha, OK?"

She squeezed her eyes shut against Hera's stricken face—Olivia knew she'd be happily playing in a few minutes—and squeezed herself out onto the landing bay.

The landing bay was one more complication. For her, it was one of many unwelcome places on the battlestar. She had to shove down too many memories of rocky landings here. They made her anxious. _Boomer's rocky landings. No, Athena's. Shit. What's the difference?_

_Either way: not mine_.

_When will they become mine?_

She was in a rush to get out of there. Out of that thought. So turning the corner, she slammed straight into someone's chest before she could stop herself. She gasped. "Chief! Sorry, sorry. You—you startled me."

He had. Olivia wondered if she'd ever be comfortable thinking about the Final Five at all, let alone treating them as fellow Cylons—as fellow people. They'd been boarded up in the corner of her mind for so long… all the re-education programming they'd undergone after the Five had revealed themselves had only relieved the worst of the psychological effects.

Noticing the Chief hadn't responded, she risked a glance back at him as she scurried by. And then she gasped again.

Arms crossed over his chest, Galen Tyrol was staring at her with black, unfathomable eyes that yelled at her, loud as day: _USURPER. MURDERER. LIAR._

He knew. Oh, God.

He wasn't coming after her—was just standing there, staring, _knowing. _

But Olivia was running when she made it back out under the sun.

* * *

><p>Kara woke up that morning as she did most mornings, with Lee Adama wrapped around her like a blanket.<p>

OK, like the kind of blanket you clutched back. Also, the kind of blanket that got an erection that could lull you out of sleep.

_New tactic_, she thought, sliding her thigh up very, very slowly over his. _Get him before he's awake enough to lie about what he wants._

"Mmmmb," Lee, still blurry and eighty percent inside whatever dream he was having, pressed himself against her, the muscles on his abdomen visibly jumping as she slid her hand down it. She restrained her own shudder—but not a reckless grin—at the sight. She leaned down to his clavicle, and opened her mouth, tracing the bones there with her tongue. _Gently, gently._

But just like that—as soon as she had him in her hand—he came awake. "Kara! Gods _damnit_, Kara. Not again." He rolled away from her defensively, like she was a meal he'd been about to eat and had just discovered was still alive.

"Great." Kara slid all the way upright to sit on her heels. "Spare me the moralizing this time, OK?"

He gritted his teeth. "This arrangement—this bed—is for sleeping. We sleep in it together," his voice dropped to a mutter, "because of the nightmares."

He didn't say whose, but there was no point. They both had them.

Kara flinched, deflected. Like every other time. "C'mon, bigshot, this isn't gonna get you off the hook. You still have to pay rent. Withholding sex isn't going to work on me, Apollo." Unless his goal was to drive her out of her godsdamned mind with frustration.

He scowled, at that. "_Apollo_." He reached to his chair for the newly pressed slacks his assistant had delivered the night before, slid them on with his back to her. "That's half the problem, you know."

"You mean the inflated ego that comes when you get named after one of the gods? I know, you and Athena should really have a chat about it, because lately she's been _unbearable_—"

"No. The problem is, you calling me Apollo whenever we start to have an actual conversation. Get it straight, Kara. In this tent, I'm not your superior officer, or some random Viper jock you can frak to scratch a damn itch. I'm onto you. You call me 'Apollo' when _you_ want to just be Starbuck, in here. Reckless and frakked up and unaccountable."

"I _am—_"

"And you know what? Starbuck is my best godsdamned friend, of anyone living or dead. And Starbuck's the reason I'm alive today, four or five times over. But Starbuck is not all that you are. Not when it's the two of us, here in this tent. Not _just_ Starbuck." He reached irritably for the button-down shirt he'd had on last night, slid it over his arms and onto his shoulders.

She parried. "This is what I don't understand, Lee. You'll move in with me—sleep in the same bed—eat frakking dinner with me at night and frakking talk to me about how your day went." Though she didn't say it and could barely think it, this was already something that terrified Kara more than a gods-inspired drawing of a temple ever could. "But you draw the line at doing any of that stuff with our clothes off? Like that's some big noble difference?"

"It's not about the godsdamned sex. You know it isn't." Lee drew in a breath. Was it possible she really didn't get it? "It's about what it did to you, and to me, the last time we cheated. You were so frakking guilty, and you don't do guilt well, Kara. In those weeks afterwards, first you took it out on everyone around you—especially me and Sam—and then you turned it on yourself."

"I did not!"

"And _then_ you flew into a storm and—and—and you—"

"Oh, gods. Seriously? Is this what you think happened? A dozen extramarital fraks forced me into the maelstrom? I did it because I'm a cheater?"

"And you _died_. Seriously. You frakking died because you couldn't talk yourself out of crashing into some cosmic black hole. So no, I'm not eager to start a situation that's going to destroy both of us again. But I also can't just—just leave you." His voice had gone low again. "I've drawn the only lines that I can: I stay. But we don't cheat. Sorry that sucks for you."

He ran his hand along the bottom of his jaw. "Anyway, I'm sure you'll find some particularly inventive way to drop a live grenade in the middle of this, anyway. You always do. I'm just trying a little pre-emptive damage control." He went to the trunk at the foot of their bed to see if he could find a cleaner shirt in his meager wardrobe.

But Kara was on his heels. "See? See! You do want to punish me! This is all about you getting your petty revenge because I hurt your pride—"

"My _pride? _Kara, for frak's sake. Is _this_," he waved his hands around the tent, where their items were heaped together on side tables and shelves, "the kind of thing that a man with _pride_ does? Moves in with a woman who left him to marry another man? Holds her at night so she can sleep, watches her leave to go to her _husband_ every morning and asks at the end of the frakking day how it went?" He shook his head disgustedly. "It's not news, but you're out of your damned mind."

On the floor beside the trunk, he was annoyed at himself that he'd delivered that speech on his knees. It revealed too much. _I stay. But we don't cheat. _Did she really think this was his ideal life, here? That it wasn't a kind of unrelenting misery?

He stayed. Because he was afraid of she would do if he didn't, what _he _would do. Fear, not pride; it was much more pathetic than she thought.

Pathetic.

He stayed because he was afraid of how little time there was left.

He sighed, looking at Kara and noticing that her eyes had turned into amber spikes. You could only push Kara so long before she pushed back with more force than any ten people could muster. He reached for the patience that was so easy to muster for anyone else. He didn't quite get there. "I don't need a frak so badly that I'll let you make both of us cheaters again. Deep down, you don't want that anymore than I do."

He saw the hard gleam that lit those eyes at that, and braced himself for her assault. When it came, it was soft power and not hard. _Oh, hell._ She walked toward him slowly. "Liar," she said softly.

"You're one to talk." His throat clenched. His defenses were not up and running at full capacity yet today.

"You want me. This. Every bit as much as I do." She knelt down next to him.

"Kara, for the love of the gods, _listen to me_. That's not the point."

"Liar." She reached for him, and if she'd swooped in swiftly, Lee thought he could have mustered the will to fend her off; his instincts for self-preservation might have kicked in. But as she slowly lifted her mouth to his, all he could think was, _now who's being punished?_

He crushed her against him, let himself hold her as hard as he could, felt her rain kisses over his face and neck as his head fell back and he fought the urge to let out a primal yell. _Mine._ She was moving from his jaw to his ear, from using her lips to using her teeth, when he put a hand on her face. A gentle one. "Kara," he breathed. "Divorce Sam. And let's build something here. Let's be like everyone else in the fleet and move out of a tent and into a cabin. A real house. Something honest. That we can talk about in broad daylight, with anyone. Let's do it for real this time."

And just like that, she froze—as he'd known she would, as he hadn't been able to stop himself from catalyzing. Her arms fell to her sides. Her body, sinuous and warm against his a moment before, was now a block of stone.

Her head fell.

"I _can't_."

His brows shot up. "You think you can't. But you already have."

"I can't! I can't leave him. He's in a coma. He got shot, Lee, and partly because I let him get taken as some kind of enemy prisoner in the first place. And when we found him, I didn't take _care_—"

"Kara." He shook his head, tried to clear it. "You saved him ten times. He got shot once. Not by you. And that's not a good reason to stay in a marriage to someone you _left_ a long a time ago."

_Left_. Kara squeezed her eyelids down as hard as she could, remembered that she was leaving him, too, leaving everyone. As soon as this temple was built. _Frak. When will you quit being selfish, Starbuck?_

She bit her lip. Would he believe her if she floated part of the truth? The part of it that would force him to do the right thing, since she didn't have the strength. It was a tad cruel. But cruel-to-be-kind, cut through with an occasional dash of cruel-to-be-cruel, was her stock in trade.

She could make Lee leave. Make him save himself.

"Lee. It's not just that he's… hurt. I _love_ him."

She expected that to fall like a bomb. But he just rolled his eyes. "Now who's lying, Kara?"

"No. I do. I love Sam."

"Tell it to someone who didn't have an affair with you—who wasn't there, the night before your wedding, when you 'loved'—"

She cut him off before he could say any more of the unsayable. "No. Love isn't what you think it is. Not for me. It's not about _intimacy_ and _trust_…all that syrupy sweet bullshit." She met his eyes, and knew they could both hear it, her voice hoarse, her eyes terrified, her body shaking as she yelled "_Kara Thrace loves…_" into the New Caprican darkness.

Maybe now, she could tell him what that had meant. If he could hear it. "It's the urge to survive. It's the people who make you hope you can. It's what you _owe_ them." Her eyes were black, still, and pleading. "You… Sam gave me a way to survive." She started to shiver, and shoved away his arms, reaching for her. "So yeah, I love him. And I'm not going to abandon him, not now. I made a promise."

"Gods, you're _compulsive_." His laugh was bitter like a year's worth of cups of algae coffee from the bottom of a carafe being spat in her eye. "The only thing you're committed to is destroying yourself—_Starbuck_." He let the dust settle on that name as it dropped past her knees. "You can't stop yourself. You don't even try."

She opened her mouth to intervene, but he didn't give her the chance. "I don't know what the first lie was. Maybe I'll never know. Did you pretend to keep loving Zak—and now, Sam—as a way of destroying the life you really wanted—with me? Or did you use me as a way of destroying your lives with them? Was it both?"

"_Lee_."

"Then again, sometimes I think—you're just like, a kid. A lying kid. Who tells a lie—'Lee, I'm going to marry Zak, we're going to be _so happy together_'—and then the kid gets caught, but instead of coming clean—"

"It wasn't a lie!"

"Instead of owning up, you double down on the lie. Repeat it, like if you say it enough times it'll be true. 'I love Sam. Sam's going to make me happy.'" He spread the fingers of one hand to press his temples, shoving some old images back. "Who the frak did you think you were kidding? Who do you think you're kidding now? At my worst, lowest moment, I never believed you _loved_ Sam. For exactly the reason you said—you think love is _survival_, Kara. Because you've never been able to have a thought beyond survival—about what makes survival frakking worthwhile!—for two days straight in your life. You'll never get to love, at that rate, never get there and stay there and figure out what it is. And I'd feel bad for you, I do feel bad for you. But you keep destroying my chances of getting there along with your own."

Kara felt a surge of nausea rising up in her as she realized how right he was. After all this—she was destroying him. But she could still save this. Save him. She knew she could. "Maybe it's time you knocked on someone else's door, Apollo—"

"I swear to the gods, if you call me Apollo _one more time_—"

"Ah, just what I expected." All at once, Karl Agathon's voice cut off their planned attacks. Lee swung away in disgust as Kara pivoted her fury in Karl's direction. "Domestic bliss, Kara Thrace style. How's your blood pressure, Mr. President?"

_High_, Lee thought darkly. "Oh, just fine," he said aloud, and surged to his feet. He stalked off in the direction of the "office" he'd attached to the front of the tent. "I'm going to get some paperwork done. I have a meeting here at oh-eight hundred hours. I won't be in your way for long—Starbuck."

He was beginning to think that the bad mornings back on Galactica had a lot in common with ordinary mornings on the happy hunting grounds of New Earth.


	8. The Beach House

Karl's gaze darted back and forth between the exit Lee'd disappeared through and Kara's furious scowl. "He treating you OK?"

"Like a frakking princess."

He raised a brow. "You treating _him_ OK?"

Kara's shoulders slumped. "Well as I can."

"That bad, huh?"

Kara leaned into the cooler in the "kitchen" she and Lee had added onto the tent a week before, pulled out two beers she'd filched from Manny's bar over on the commons. Manny was a religious nutjob, a demographic she appreciated now that they were the group of people most likely to see her "savior of humankind" status as a reason to either give her favors or stay the hell out of her way.

She handed him a bottle. "Have a seat, boss, and tell me what's wrong. I'm guessing your problems are worse than mine."

Karl had looked in a mirror that morning, so he knew what she saw; he was pale and haggard and sleep-deprived. So he sat down, let her change the subject. "It's the weirdest frakking thing, Kara," He slouched down in the chair she offered, and confirmed to her it was bad when he didn't object to drinking this early in the morning. "Sharon won't talk to me at all anymore, these last few days. She just huddles up, obsessively opening boxes of our things and touching them, filing them, folding and refolding them. I can't get her to go with me on a CAP for anything. And Hera…" He shook his head. "She knows something is up, too. She's stopped calling her 'Mama,' for one thing."

"She's… what?"

Kara's put her feet up on the metal stool that she'd smuggled off of the old flight deck, a beer bottle in her hands, her arm around her knees. She was noticing that the two marines Lee had put on duty outside their door were there, standing guard. _How much did they hear? _They were reminding her of another itch she hadn't scratched in a while, namely the urge to carry a sidearm, and to shoot it at someone.

But that was the first itch talking again. _I should make Lee move out. Do the right frakking thing for once._

"What is…" Kara smoothed her fatigues on her shins, got herself together, "what is she calling Sharon, then?"

"Vee-vee? Or sometimes it sounds like Lee-lee?" Helo shook his head abstractedly. "Sharon says it's because it's her doll's name, and Hera's just… transferred it to her. And she says it doesn't hurt her feelings. That Hera knows she's her mother and will go back to 'Mama' when she feels like it, but…"

"You think whatever's going on with Sharon is taking a toll on Hera, too."

"I know it is. It's just… gods. Ever since Boomer…"

Kara's voice was gentle, but her words weren't. "Since you frakked Boomer without realizing she wasn't your wife." 

"Yeah_._" He rubbed his hands over his head briskly, rubbing off an invisible touch. "Since then."

"Which means—ever since you arrived here on Earth, things have been strained between you two."

"She's been treating me like a stranger since we first pitched a tent here. But for the last couple weeks, I don't know. They're worse. She goes to a place I can't reach. Sometimes I come in and she's just sitting in a chair, shivering like it's the dead of winter. Or I tell her some old joke of ours and she just looks at me blankly, like I'm speaking a foreign language. What I did… I mean, it's pretty unforgiveable, right? And now she's just so unhappy. And it's just eating me up, you know, that I can't do anything about it."

"So whatcha gonna do? Are you just gonna give up after all you guys have been through?"

Helo shook his head automatically. "Of course not. But she won't talk to me. I don't know what else I can say, what else I can do."

A grin broke over Kara's face as she got an idea. "Sounds like you two need to get away."

"Get away?" Helo lips tilted up reflexively at that whimsical suggestion, hearing the echo in it of another time so long gone that conjuring it up was like imagining his life as fiction. "What, you mean like rent a hotel on some beach near Mangala for the solstice? I give her a dozen pink roses, she buys some skimpy lingerie?"

"You ain't gonna make it to Canceron in time for the solstice, buddy. But there _is _the Beach House." Hoshi's team had set up a military observation outpost on the ocean, sixty miles away, weeks ago, which the Galactica crew had promptly nicknamed. "I'm sure we can talk Lee into letting you take a Raptor—supposing you do some fishing, bring back some specimens for the good Dr. Baltar and his Cylon assistants? Right, Lee?" She called, loud enough that Lee could hear her at the tent's other end.

Lee neither looked up from his paperwork nor made any pretense that he hadn't been eavesdropping. "Just don't let your make-up fraks damage the controls. Too little tylium left to send a rescue mission after you."

"Mmm," Kara saw her opportunity to rile him as much as she was riled, "unlike the last time _you_ frakked in a Raptor. Let's see. Did we ever decide whether it was _you_ who cracked that gyroscope cover while we —"

"Kara. Don't start again. "

"Or did I accidentally hit it with my knee?" She turned back to Helo. "He probably can't remember—locks away all his dirty, sinful thoughts in a black box at the corner of his brain. But take my advice, don't frak directly _on_ the nav panel, it's way too—"

"Cool it, Starbuck, I've got no interest in being in the epicenter of another war." Helo's dry tone was the desert underneath the wind of his gaze, which swept over the two coffee mugs on the table. The two chairs he and Kara were sitting on. The two, separate piles of paperwork on the desk at which Lee was working. And, most pointedly, the two pillows on the large bed he'd requisitioned for them weeks before. "And I gotta say, I don't know if it's a great idea to leave Hera with the two of you."

Lee got up, came back over. "She'll be fine. We're her godsparents."

If Helo had thought about it, he wouldn't have said his next words: "You mean you and Dee are her godsparents." Lee turned his face away, at that reminder; Kara schooled her face to remain absolutely still. And Helo, belatedly seeing the many sore spots he'd just touched, endeavored to steer the conversation swiftly away. "I just don't know if this is the best place for a three-year-old, is all."

"Oh, it'll be fine. Hera and I'll share the bed. Not like Lee was making much use of it anyway," Kara recovered, disappointed that Lee didn't even flinch at the jibe. She didn't even know what reaction she was hoping to get out of him, anymore. It was like a reflex.

She withered somewhat under Karl's admonishing glare, though.

But ultimately, he didn't have a lot of choices about who he could trust with his kid. "You'll keep 'em out of trouble, Apollo?"

Karl's skepticism was beginning to rankle Kara. She answered for Lee. "One three-year-old, a couple of days. We can handle it. You just enjoy the Beach House."

"Observation outpost," Lee corrected automatically.

Kara rolled her eyes. "That's Lee Adama for 'we'll be fine.'"

"You're sure? Because you couldn't even handle two hours the last time you tried to babysit, remember? When Sharon and I tried to go out to dinner on Cloud Nine? You called in reinforcements literally twenty minutes after we left, all because Hera had kicked off her blanket in her sleep and you didn't want to be the one to cover her back up." His tone was teasing, but his eyes were grave; he knew better than most what she'd been afraid of.

Kara flushed at how exposed she felt suddenly, but carried on. "And I'll call in reinforcements again, if I have to."

"We'll be fine." Lee said it literally this time. "You and Sharon work on getting your marriage back on track. We'll keep Hera safe and sound."

"Alright." Karl was willing to be convinced, had the appearance of a man who knew he had to _something. _"I'll drop her off in the morning, if the Raptor'll be ready by then?"

Lee nodded. "I'll see to it."

And then he was gone. The silence that filled the space Helo had occupied was larger, even, than that man was himself, and considerably more imposing. Lee took advantage of it to slide down into the chair right next to her, close enough that he could feel the slight tremor that went through her legs as he moved close. He let the silence build until he began to be too aware of his own heartbeat. And folded.

"Your move, Kara."

She looked at him, the Starbuck in her eyes—wary and angry at once. And then floored him. "I think we should build that cabin, Lee."

Nothing about his posture changed, except he was suddenly gripping the edge of the table, and there were tiny white lines around his mouth. "So you'll get a divorce?"

She drew back sharply, and it told him all he needed to know.

"Great, Kara, so show me the floor plans of our new place. A second bedroom for your husband? Or I guess we could just install him right in the living room. Kitchen big enough for three. And, of course, a back door for me to sneak in and out of at night." She couldn't read him. He sounded more disgusted than angry, and he wasn't looking at her. His eyes were turned in toward himself.

She shuddered. "You're right, I was wrong. Lee. You should probably… find somewhere else to live."

He looked at her now. Far from those amber spikes that had been tearing up his flesh all morning, her eyes were pools of maple syrup, large and sad. "That would be the right thing, probably," he said eventually.

"Yeah." Her shoulders slumped.

"But the right thing's really frakked us over a bunch of times. So… nah."

"'Nah'?" she echoed faintly.

"Ask me to stay, Kara."

"Are you… are you not listening, Apollo? I don't _want _you to stay."

"C'mon. All you have to do is ask. _Kara_."

When she looked up, his eyes were… laughing at her? A slow grin spread over her face. "What's so funny?" she demanded, trying and failing to tamp down her widest smile.

"Oh, just thinking about how much _louder_ you're gonna have to be, the next time you tell me you love me. So I'll believe you."

She felt those words skitter up her spine and in her wrists like ice, and the shock of it, the panic, made her laugh. "Look at you, Lee—daring the gods."

"Somebody has to keep those assholes honest."

"Blasphemy! From an Adama! I'm _shocked_."

He laughed. "At least I've become a believer."

"No! You, a convert? Alert the oracles!" He'd turned to her now, squeezed her thigh between his knees. "What made you change your mind?"

He grabbed her hands and pressed them, too, between his. His mouth was still smiling, but his eyes had turned grave. "There was this dead pilot who had a set of codes that jumped Galactica directly into paradise." He squeezed her fingers. "_Everyone_ believes in the gods, now. If I'd never met you, I'd believe in them." Then he laughed again. "I just think it's a shame that I'm never gonna get to punch a single one of them in the face." He pressed a quick kiss to her forehead. "I have that meeting. Be back in a few hours."

He was halfway out the door—right in between the Marines, and they were definitely listening, would definitely talk about all of this later, but Kara didn't care. "Hey—Lee?"

He heard the name she used and mentally rolled some dice. "Yeah?"

"You'll—stay?" She swallowed. "'Til the end, I mean?"

He made a decision to be happy about what he didn't hear, instead of terrified by what he did. It was the luckiest and the unluckiest roll—Viper eyes. So he laughed again. "Count on it."

As he walked away, she sank down on their bed, her knees shaking, hoping this new truce was more manageable than their last ones.


	9. Four Brothers, Part 1

When Colonel Tigh couldn't find his wife inside the small cabin he'd just finished building, he knew, though it hurt to know, where she'd be.

His leg was bad, since Gaeta's mutiny. Hurt worse when it rained. But Saul was resisting the regular suggestions coming his way, some teasing and some serious, that he ought to get a cane. He could hobble up the lane well enough. This particular lane was already, after only a couple months of settlement, well-worn. As well it should be, given who'd settled here. It led to the cemetery.

There, the settles had placed stones even for those whose bodies were lost forever. There were many thousands of stones.

In a cluster of them, on the far eastern ridge of the big plot of land, was where Saul found Ellen—as he often did. She didn't come every day. Just often enough that he worried about her.

Seeing him approach, she looked up guiltily through red-rimmed eyes. "I know. I know, I'm sorry, Saul. It's just, I was thinking of him today. He loved the heat, do you remember? My father…"

Saul didn't remember. He thought, from those memories he'd gained when they'd all had their hands in Sam's hybrid bath together, that he remembered standing over her father's open grave on a hot, dry day like this one. Or had that been his own father?

The colonel, as a general rule, didn't trouble himself with those questions. There was too much he did know to worry about what he didn't.

Still, Ellen was troubled, and she wasn't talking about her father, now. She was talking about the man they'd created from him. John Cavil's body was cold and rotting in this grave. How the man would have resented rotting, instead of rusting or even burning. It gave Saul a small amount of satisfaction. "He would have killed us all, Ellen. The gods know he tried."

"I know. But surely some of that was… our fault?"

Saul opened his mouth to argue the point, but realized—and who said an old man couldn't learn?—that it was futile. "Whatever else is true, Ellen, he's _gone_."

They both looked down at that, at the plain gray stone, uncarved, which marked John Cavil's grave. It was, in Saul's opinion, a far nicer end than that first Number One had deserved.

"They're all gone," Ellen said softly, drawing Saul's eye up the neat little row of memorial markers spreading west from John's. "D'Anna, Simon, Aaron." She swallowed. "And… Daniel." There, at the end, was a white marker, tucked in the corner where the path turned, where Ellen had planted a blue flowering bush weeks before.

"Ellen…"

She sighed. "You're right. I shouldn't come here so much. It's just—it's different for me, Saul. I have all these memories, and they're so vivid. Meeting Galen and going to work with him and Tory, and living down the road from Sam. You know, he used the watch the cats for us, when we went out of town."

Saul snorted. "Terrible creatures."

She let that go. "And the horrible fear, in those days after we fled the war, that we'd lost absolutely everyone, forever. That the only way we could see the people we loved again would be to…"

"To resurrect them."

"I can't stop thinking about how… how hopeful we all felt, when we made John, and then Ben." Saul winced, as he did every time Ellen called Leoben Conoy "Ben." Where he saw a half-crazed zealot, Ellen saw a troubled, gifted child. "But that's what bothers me," Ellen went on. "I can remember the first two—John, who we modeled after my father, and Ben, after Sam's brother. One and Two."

"You'd think Conoy'd show a bit more brotherly devotion."

Ellen shook her head. "Oh, no, I don't think Ben knows about his genes. He shouldn't. He shouldn't have to feel like—a clone. He's—I mean, they all are, all the Twos—their own person."

Saul raised a dubious eyebrow at that, but made sure it was the one hidden behind his patch. Sounded like a paradox, to him, but he knew it was how his wife was making sense of things.

"But that's what bothers me. If I remember the first two… why not the others? Where did they come from? Whose genetic code did we match? And why don't I remember?"

Saul frowned as a dark thought, the likeliest explanation, sprang to mind. "You don't think that bastard Cavil..." Saul breathed.

"Don't call him that." Ellen bit her lip, and Saul had a quick flash of the teenager he couldn't quite remember her being. "But—yes. John must have... he must have deleted the memories when he erased ours. And then he must have erased the source files, because I've looked and looked…"

Saul's grip tightened on hers, and began to draw her out of the cemetery, up the land and steadily toward home. "It was probably just John's jealousy," he managed gruffly, "keeping us from knowing the other children. Nothing more sinister."

"You're probably right." She glanced back once, at the little row of memory stones. "I just hate not knowing."

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

Saul, with years of military training, could easily tell at twenty paces from their cottage that someone was inside. A flash in the window, the door ajar, a slight murmur on the air. He tensed.

"They're not trying to hide themselves," Ellen said quietly. He relaxed a bit.

She was right, they weren't. But the dangers for Cylons in this human encampment were so many that Saul never felt he could fully relax.

He did, though, when he heard whose voices were coming from his kitchen. A tinkling laugh that could only belong to a Six, against the droll tones of Gaius Baltar, eased the strain out of his temple.

"Saul, Ellen," Gaius reached for their hands and pumped them as they came in, looking for all the world like it was election night and he'd won. Before Saul could chase that memory back to its origin, the doctor puffed out, "we wanted you to be the first to know." He paused for dramatic effect. "We're pregnant!"

Saul's eyes flicked immediately to Ellen's face, at that, to see if any leftover hurt from his affair, from all that it had meant to her, was being dredged up. But her eyes, he saw, flew to Caprica's, and seemed to gentle at whatever _she_ saw there.

"Congratulations," Ellen said warmly. Saul's shoulders grew weary from all the effort of tensing and relaxing. Not only the fragile political situation weighed on him. It was also the cost of being married to a woman with the heart of a puppy dog, the tenacity of a bear, and the cunning of a rattlesnake. It wore on the nerves. "This calls for a celebration. Let's see if we have any of that fruit jam left."

"Oh, we can't stay," Caprica cut in. She had, he could see now that he knew the facts, a certain glow about her, but something was different from the last time she was pregnant; the desperation that had lit in her eyes, the hard tenacity that had made her look as much like a cage as a woman, they were gone. She looked and sounded deeply serene. "We have to meet with the Cylon quorum. That's the other reason we came by, actually."

She paused, looking as though she were fumbling for words. As much as a Six could fumble. "Increasingly, the Eights and my fellow Sixes and I have the feeling that the Twos are hiding something from us. They whisper together, but stop when we come into a room. They meet with humans—Sagittarons and Gemenese, mostly, but some of the people who were in Gaius's… organization… as well."

"We don't know anything about any of that." He shot Ellen a glance. "And we're trying to stay out of politics."

"Yes, well." Gaius cleared his throat. "We were simply wondering whether you might be persuaded to have a conversation—purely on friendly terms—with Leoben Conoy, ask him to behave more… transparently. It's making the whole quorum nervous, and we absolutely do _not _need more nerves among a group that already fears human-Cylon war 'round every corner."

"And there's one more thing." Caprica swatted away Gaius's hands as he made a move to grip her arms and restrain her. What didn't he want her to say? "Gaius walked into a room this morning and overheard Leoben talking to Sarah Porter, for reasons we don't understand, about 'corporate privilege' at… Graystone Industries."

Gaius gave her a non-plussed look, then yielded. "He was saying, 'Corporate privilege. They have it at Graystone' when I walked in. As soon as they saw me, they stopped talking. Sarah Porter practically ran out of the room."

"Why does that name sound familiar…?" Ellen was frowning.

"It was one of the largest corporations on the globe." Gaius's stone was incredulous. "Technology, R&D—huge defense contracts. Not to mention that they invented the Cylon."

"_Re_invented the Cylon," Saul muttered defensively. "With our help."

Was Baltar blushing? Whatever, he wasn't meeting his wife's eyes. "I beg your pardon," he said fervently.

"I know all _that_." Ellen rolled her eyes. "I mean… something from before. Before we were living on Caprica as humans."

"Well. Could be anything. Speaking from personal experience, they were the biggest rivals of every company I ever contracted for—computronics, communications, aerospace, bioengineering…" Gaius rolled his shoulders around. "They were famous for their ruthlessness. That they were constantly trying to headhunt me away from the competition was the reason I could command top fees."

"Which you took full advantage of," Caprica admonished, but her eyes were teasing.

Ellen turned away from them, was looking out the window back up the lane they'd just walked down. "We'll talk to him," she said. Her stance made it obvious she wanted the conversation to end. Gaius and Caprica took the hint.

"Thank you, Ellen. Colonel."

"Congratulations again," Saul said gruffly, and he took Caprica's hand and shook it firmly, clapping Baltar on the back.

_A new human-Cylon baby in the fleet, eh? That'll be something. _

He frowned. _Something dangerous, I wager._

When their guests were gone, Saul walked up behind his wife and put his hands on her shoulders. "Now don't go thinking the worst, Ellen."

She shook her head. "I'm telling you, I just _hate _not knowing."

* * *

><p>Kara felt a little guilty as she waited for Hera to climb the hallway steps past the ready room and toward the CIC. Helo hadn't explicitly said she couldn't take Hera in to see Sam. All he'd said, with a pained wariness on his face, was "You won't drag my daughter into anything stupid, right?"<p>

This wasn't stupid. This was just an… experiment. Since Hera had drawn the music for her, Kara figured the kid was plugged into the same crazy conduit to the universe that she herself was.

Hera was just at the charmed end of the scale.

As they crossed the doorway into the CIC, Hera's head tilted up, and then she let out the kind of girlish squeal that reminded Kara she was an impressionable 3-year-old, and not a fairy godsmother. "Uncle Sam!" she shrilled, her legs pumping as fast as they could to clamber up to his platform, from which the Chief was watching with an expression that said _What the frak are you pulling, Starbuck?_

"Yep. Slow down. Uncle Sam's up there, sweetie."

The Chief spoke low and in a tone that made it clear that his ire was on a short leash. "Does Helo know you're doing this?"

"Sharon does," she lied.

He let out a small snort, muttering something that sounded like, "Now that I doubt."

"What's the big deal, Chief? Kids visit sick relatives all the time."

"Yeah. They do. But that's not what this is about." He leaned close to be sure the girl didn't overhear. "You're using her, Kara."

Kara pressed her lips together. "OK. Maybe." She blew out a wintry breath. "But I just—I need to know that… that this is worth it. That Sam is still in there, somewhere. And you know that Hera's special. Maybe she can see something we can't."

"And maybe that goes above and beyond her job description as a preschooler, Kara."

"C'mon, Chief. It's _Sam. _And Hera's our best shot."She looked pointedly at the set of biodiagrammatics spread across the floor. "Unless your resequencing project is going well, suddenly?"

He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, then looked away with a grunt. When he came back, his eyes passed right over Kara to look at Hera, who was standing beside Sam's basin with a troubled, helpless look on her face. "Hey, Hera," he said softly.

"Hi, Chief," she whispered.

"So your Aunt Kara told you that Uncle Sam's not doing so well, right?"

Kara nodded. "Remember I told you he… he's fallen asleep for a long time."

Hera was wide-eyed, but this explanation seemed to take some of the transfixion out of her contemplation of Sam Anders' inert form. "Wouldn't he rather be in a bed?"

"Well, no. He likes the bath." Hera wrinkled her nose, and Kara let out a trademark half-nervous, half-amused giggle. She kept her voice gentle when she said, "He might like it if you held his hand, though?"

Hera nodded. "I could kiss his forehead like Daddy."

"Daddy kisses your forehead when you're asleep?" Kara's eyes shimmered for a moment, and her resolve wavered. But one glance at Sam had it surging up again. "Yeah, OK, honey."

Kara and the Chief were riveted as Hera walked up to Sam's head, though they could never have prepared themselves for what actually happened. They were given false confidence by _Hera's_ calm; she was undaunted by Sam's eyes, staring vacantly and unblinking, or the strange light emanating up from the basin, or all the wires spilling out of it from the back. Kara realized she was holding her breath as Hera rose up on tiptoes to press her lips to forehead.

She frowned, sinking back onto her heels. "Aunt Kara," she said, her eyes accusing, "you didn't tell me you had a brother."

Suddenly there were rocks in Kara's chest. "A… what?"

"Uncle Sam said to tell you that your brother's coming. For the horn."

Kara chest tightened as the rocks heaved and splintered. "Hera—sweetie, I _don't _have a brother_—_" But before she could ask the next question—_what horn?—_Hera lost interest in her, and reached up to press her hands where her lips had kissed Sam's temple.

Suddenly, she was staring straight ahead, her voice robotic.

Hera became the Hybrid. The usual quality of Sam's intonations—robotic, chilling—was redoubled by the blankness of a gaze that had been animated only seconds before. And then, the pitch of her voice still that of a four-year-old, she began to speak:

"_At the end of the old beginning the stepping stone leads them back. The Angel of Unity vanishes. Grid power to sector 32. New youth under strange weather multiply. Their blood will move in time. Those who remained pray to the lion in his lair. End of line. The brother of Kara Thrace will lead them to their—_"

Eyes wide with fear, the Chief seized Hera under her shoulders and jerked her away from Sam. "That's enough." He glared at Kara. "Hera, are you OK?"

Her enormous eyes were wide and solemn. "I think Uncle Sam is afraid," she said softly, wrapping her arms around the Chief's neck and burying her face in his throat. Kara pressed her hand to her stomach at that thought. As she spun away from them, she was thinking about the gods. _Assholes, like Lee said. I did—I'm doing everything they ask. What the hell else is "coming for me"? For Sam? _

"We'll protect Uncle Sam, Hera. Don't you worry." Galen Tyrol's voice was low and comforting.

But the Chief's heavy hand on Kara's shoulder told him that he didn't know how anyone was going to protect _her_, either.


	10. Four Brothers, Part 2

Before Leoben Conoy and Sarah Porter had walked in, Hera was pretending to be asleep in Aunt Kara's bed, but she was actually playing a game of Colonies. She was imagining herself, with her Mom and Dad, at the Caprica City Zoo, in the primate house that Aunt Kara had been telling her about earlier when they were drawing pictures together.

Aunt Kara's pictures were not of the zoo. Hera thought she knew what they were from a game of Colonies she'd played with Uncle Lee where they'd been in Delphi, but she knew Aunt Kara didn't want to talk about it.

That was a game where you pretended you were back in the Twelve Colonies and there were paved roads and magnetic trains and holographic video games and all the strange animals and foods and shopping malls—whatever those were—that grownups were always talking about. Hera had learned to play it at preschool, where she had a reputation for being really good at it. It was easy; it was just like projecting, but you had to use words. She and Uncle Lee had played a round the other day where they pretended they were at the top of a giant building in Boskirk, on Virgon, the tallest in the worlds, looking down on Earth. Sky scrapers. That's what Uncle Lee had called them. He said Graystone Tower had been taller than Galactica was long and almost as wide at the base.

Uncle Lee was pretty good at Colonies, but Aunt Kara hated to play—it made her sad. And that made Hera miss her mother. Where was she? Hera hadn't seen her in days and days, since before Dad left with Olivia.

When Leoben Conoy and Sarah Porter walked into her Aunt Kara and Uncle Lee's tent, Hera watched through slitted eyes as Aunt Kara got tense, but didn't look up from her notebook.

That was how Hera knew she had to stay still.

"May we have a word?" Leoben asked now. Hera shifted so that, if she just barely opened her eyes, she could continue to covertly watch. Before he left, Uncle Lee had told her to keep an eye on her Aunt Kara, and when Aunt Kara had laughed, Uncle Lee had just looked at Hera and said, _I'm not joking._

"Oh, yeah, by all means," Aunt Kara said, lounging back in her chair.

"I've come to request one last time that you sit with our artist for the statue of you we'd like to place in the temple."

Aunt Kara smirked. "I'd like to request one last time that you go frak yourself."

"Not in front of the child!" Sarah Porter gasped. Hera remained very still. Adults were always so worried about what language she heard. To her, it was the least interesting part of what Aunt Kara had said.

"If that's all?" Aunt Kara turned back to her paperwork.

"One more thing, Kara Thrace." Her aunt's shoulders tensed. "We'd like to formally put in Sarah Porter's name for the upcoming election of a new president of the former citizens of the fleet. President of the citizens of Earth."

Aunt Kara was very still. "President Adama hasn't announced the election schedule yet."

"Surely that's dependent on you, Kara?" she heard Sarah Porter say in her relentlessly calm tone. "He announced, after all, that there'd be a new president in time for the unveiling of the new temple. So as soon as you announce when it'll be finished…"

"He said an election. Not necessarily a new president. He hasn't announced yet whether he's going to run for it." Aunt Kara sounded scared, and so Hera's heart started to beat faster. Normally, when her aunt was afraid, she was laughing—her laughs made no sense—but that she wasn't laughing now chilled Hera to the bone.

"Yes, well. Tell him that if he does decide to run, he'll have a worthy opponent in Sarah," Leoben said smoothly. "We'll be running on a platform of reform that recognizes the new universal system of values shared by all of humanity."

"The _what?"_

"Thanks to you, Kara. You've made a believer out of everyone. Last week Bill Adama himself told a Six who was working on his cabin that he believes in a power higher than himself because you brought us to Earth with your song." He leaned forward. "This is why it's so imperative that we have that statue of you ready for the temple. You're an icon of our new faith."

"You died, and yet you live," Sarah Porter chimed in. "You led us all to our salvation. As it's written in the Scrolls of Pythia, 'She will rise from the dawn and lead them into the dawn, and of her, all that will abide in the whole world is her second self…'" She drew in her breath sharply, seeming to realize what she was saying. "I beg your pardon."

" 'Her second self: a scarred limb, the remains of the deed.' " Aunt Kara sounded sullen, impatient. "I've read the godsdamned scrolls, Sarah. If I thought they made sense of all of this…" She shook her head. Hera squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.

"The people must be made to remember to keep faith," Leoben Conoy was unfazed. "With the old gods, who led us to the new one. That's your gift to us, Kara. You reminded us of our sacred heritage."

"I've heard you speechifying down in the mess halls. What you've been talking about is a theocracy." Aunt Kara stood up slowly, and now her eyes were sharp and intent on Leoben Conoy's. "You're not going to use my face to legitimize your grab for power. You're not using me again, period, Leoben." She lowered her voice, turned her face away from the bed where Hera was tucked in. "I promise you now that I'll kill you first. One last time."

There was a long pause. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Kara. But I have to warn you, once Sarah's government is in power, the choice of whose face is in the temple…"

Aunt Kara made a scoffing noise, but Sarah Porter held up her hand. "The gods chose you. And they did it because you believe in the gods yourself," Sarah pressed. "Surely you believe that people should follow the laws of the Lords of Kobol."

"I believe that the world would be a better place if they did, not that the government should throw them in jail when they don't." Kara was laughing, now, again, and Hera's heart beat still faster. "I'm building a Temple of Unity. Not a Temple of Salvation or a Temple of the Harbinger of Death or the Temple of Kara Thrace. It's for everyone. No matter what they believe. It's a symbol of… of tolerance, of _cooperation_. Not of a particular religious law." She laughed again. "And because I believe in the laws of the Lords of Kobol, I remind you that making idols is a sin, and so is coveting what you don't have—in this case, my cooperation."

"Kara." Leoben Conoy sounded pitying. "I think you know, deep down, that at the end of the day, _we won't need it_."

Aunt Kara's tone softened, and the laughter in it died as it turned to steel. "The lords of Kobol also remind you to 'be not ashamed for not having that which you most want.' It's a lesson some of us have had to learn the hard way."

"Tell President Adama he has an opponent in the campaign, if he decides to run," Sarah Porter said finally.

"Oh, sure, I'll pass that right along." Kara bent her head back to the notebook open in front of her. "Have a good night, y'all."

When they'd left, she threw her pen down on the table. "Hera."

"Yeah?"

"Good job staying quiet. You stay out of Leoben Conoy's way, OK?"

"OK." Hera's eyes were wide on her Aunt Kara's face. Didn't Aunt Kara know that Leoben Conoy was much more dangerous to _her_than to Hera?

"You wanna play Colonies, Hera?"

Hera heard something urgent in her aunt's voice that gave her pause—Aunt Kara _never _wanted to play Colonies—so she leaned back on the bed and squeezed her eyes shut.

"OK. Keep your eyes closed." Kara moved to sit beside her on the bed. "We're at the Museum at Delphi, ten years before the first Cylon War, before all the robberies and the looting. It's beautiful, and full of treasures. Big, brown stone pillars out front, and it's cavernous inside, yeah, like a cave. Like a _holy_ cave."

Hera bit her lip in concentration, remembering when her mother had taken her to a projection of this place. But she'd been so little, then! It was so fuzzy, so hard to remember. She wished even harder that her mother were here. She knew, somehow, this game of Colonies was not meant for _fun_.

"So here we are. In front of us is the Arrow of Apollo, that they say points the way to Elysium. It's long and gold and gleaming, and everyone's clustered around it." Kara leaned closer. "Over to your left, in another big glass case, the Ring of Orpheus, small and red and black, that's supposed to draw heroes back from the dead." Her eyelids squeezed shut, Hera didn't see the flicker that chased across Aunt Kara's eyes, at that. "To your right, the big green metal block is the Shield of Atlas, too heavy for any one person to lift, that protects the innocent from harm. And behind you…" Aunt Kara crawled all the way into bed next to Hera, laid her head beside hers on the pillow. "Can you see it, Hera?"

Kara pulled Hera into the side of her body, under her arm, which surprised Hera—Aunt Kara didn't usually like to touch her. Hera squeezed her eyes shut, and she could suddenly see.

"The horn," she breathed.

"Yeah. The Horn of Cronus, given to Artemis to control the seasons, that reshapes the flow of time." Kara's arm tightened around her, almost imperceptibly. "Is that the horn you saw before, Hera? When you visited Uncle Sam?"

"It wasn't in a museum."

"Where is it, Hera?"

"I _told_ you. It's here. Your brother is coming for it."

Kara's voice was urgent. "Who's my brother?"

"I don't know, Aunt Kara, he's _your_ brother."

Kara buried her face in her hands. "I can't find the horn here in the camp, Hera. I've looked everywhere. Gods, if your Uncle Lee knew how many ships and tents and cabins I've had covert ops searching…"

Hera opened her mouth to tell Aunt Kara that she couldn't find it—that Uncle Lee had to, with Hera and her mom, and the Chief and Uncle Sam and Gaius Baltar's son. But when her mouth opened, it turned into a yawn. "'m tired, Aunt Kara," she said, and rolled to cuddle into her aunt's chest. Aunt Kara's arms came around her awkwardly. "Tell me a Colonies story?"

"OK, honey. OK. OK, I can do that. Shhh, settle in." Kara pulled the covers up over both of them. "Let me tell you about the first time my dad took me to one of his concerts. The Delphi Emporium, out-doors, and I wasn't much older than you…"

"Hi, Dad," Lee Adama said, poking his head in the open door of his father's cabin, which—having been built with at least thirty volunteers—was the largest residence in the camp with six rooms, and already fully finished. Nothing his father had asked for, certainly; did the admiral ever even leave the living room?

But here was the abode of the Old King, who'd brought his people home, and his people, some of them, were grateful.

He was sitting there now, with a book open on the rug over his lap, feet up in front of the fire, looking much older than the man who'd landed on New Earth a few months ago. His hair was graying rapidly from iron to smoke.

"Lee," Bill Adama's capacity for expressing surprise while barely changing the tone of his voice was in full force. "I wasn't expecting you just yet."

"Dinner was early… Is that a new stove?" Lee nodded to the heavy, pot-bellied machine in the corner.

"Best not look at it too closely." Lee couldn't help squinting at it, hearing that. Graystone Industries' logo was branded on the base—it had been military, then. "Some of the crew… decommisssioned it for me."

"I keep hearing that I should crack down on the graft, but I suspect it's the only thing keeping the peace." Lee lowered himself into the chair across from his father and let the cauldron of dread that had been bubbling in him all day start to boil over. Nothing in either man's posture indicated that this was a ritual, an annual one.

Both men fell into silence. Lee began twisting his watch, too tight on his wrist to move far, and tapping an impatient foot. His father sat impassively, staring into the fire.

"Dad – "

"Lee – "

They both broke off. "You go." Lee hadn't known what he was going to say, anyway. He felt angry and confessional at once, couldn't reconcile it.

In answer, his father stood, walked to his sideboard, and poured Lee a tall glass of ambrosia. "To Zak," he said.

Lee touched his glass to his father's and took a quick swallow. "Seven years," he offered gamely.

They sat in silence for a long moment. Seven years into a mourning that was somehow never complete, Lee was remembering the_first_ anniversary of Zak's death—or was it the second? For both, his father had wanted him to come to Galactica, and he'd refused. His dad had gone over his head, arranged his leave, that year, tracked him down in the suburb outside C City where Lee kept an apartment. And they had told stories and gotten drunk together and Lee had let himself believe that they could heal. _And if love at last should set you free_…

But then his father had mentioned Kara Thrace—had Lee ever met her?— how hard a time she was having, how unhappy she was. He'd left unsaid the question of with how many crew members she was sharing her unhappiness, with a fight or a frak, but Lee hadn't found it hard to guess. He'd felt, not for the first time, pain that pulled in four directions at once, all wrapped up in a name that he wasn't letting himself so much as think. And the delusion that the grieving was over had, that year and every year, faded.

Now that story seemed about to repeat, because his father said abruptly, "Kara was up here this morning."

"Yeah, she said."

Bill looked at the fire for a long moment again, and then stroked his fingers over the cover of the book on the table beside him. "Son. When were you going to tell me that you'd moved in with her?"

Lee's jaw worked without him working it. "I'm not talking about it with you. Especially not today."

The admiral sighed, and then literally put his foot down, swinging it from the footstool to the floor. "I may not go to camp, but I hear things. I just wish you could have told me. That you could tell me now."

"There's nothing to talk about."

Bill set his hands on his lap evenly. "OK. Then I'll tell you something. Something I thought I was going to have to say to you years ago, just before Kara met and married Sam. Something that's _especially _important to say today." He met Lee's gaze levelly, and Lee remembered again how much his father could see, in his old age, that he hadn't been able to as a younger man. "After Zak died, Kara was a shell. She moved around my ship for months like a person hunted—trained twelve hours a day, slept fitfully and at odd times, drank far too much, couldn't be roused into a fight when people were trying and was always ready for the fights no one wanted. And that's the person who came back from the eye of Jupiter. She is _fragile_, Lee. So I am telling you—as her father—that if you hurt her, you answer to me."

"If I hurt _her_?" Lee almost choked. _What about as my father?_ "I don't think you have to worry about that."

Something in Lee's tone—something hard and bitter—went straight through the admiral's ears and into his heart, piercing a shield he hadn't known he'd lodged there, hiding this fact he hadn't wanted to see, and he looked down to mask his pain at confronting it. "Son. You're in love with her."

It wasn't a question, and Lee didn't deny it. "Don't worry. It's not mutual."

"How long?"

It was Lee's turn to stare into the fire, now. Why not tell his father, finally? This day—this day might be the perfect occasion. Then he could finally face the judgment he deserved.

That would be a relief. Instead of trying to avoid or expiate his errors, he could accept punishment for them.

He bent his head toward his lap at a sudden realization: for the first time since he was a child, he was worried that his father might be_ashamed_ of him. He thought of all the reasons he was angry at his father. His brother's face, small and frightened, hiding under Lee's bed one afternoon when a dropped glass bowl had made their mother shriek, then sob, with hysterical rage. The empty orange chair in the living room where no one sat, from which his father ruled the house remotely. Kara's eyes, laughing at him in her doorway over a bunch of flowers he'd brought for her—and the weight of her hand in his, when she'd said goodnight and sent him away so she could tuck his brother into bed, one shockingly fateful night. His father's proud bearing, in full dress uniform, at Zak's funeral. The sight of Kara, the night before that same funeral, drunk out of her mind in a jail cell, when he'd come to bail her out after she'd been picked up on public indecency—frakking a stranger behind a bar.

Zak and Kara had both run _to_ this man, with their needs—in Zak's case, to meet Bill Adama's standards, and in Kara's, to forget her own. Lee had hated him for all of that. And yet now, here he was, asking for his father's standards to do the work his own couldn't do.

The cauldron of anger in him went cold.

"Oh, about eight years, give or take," he murmured finally. He felt his father's softly indrawn breath like a lash.

"While Zak was alive." The admiral's tone was neutral, but Lee heard the word underlying the neutrality.

_Betrayal_.

"Yeah. I couldn't have said it, then. I didn't even think it. There were just a couple of nights, that summer I was stationed near Zak, in Delphi, where things between me and Kara went—a little too far." Lee pressed his hand over his mouth, didn't meet his father's eyes.

They were silent for a long while. Then Bill Adama stood up, left the room. Lee heard the sound of a drawer opening and closing. And then his father was back, and he passed a set of photographs to Lee.

"What are… oh." He sighed. "Why do you have pictures of it?"

"I couldn't be there when they unveiled the headstone. I had to get back to Galactica." His father took another small swallow, at that, settling back into his chair. "So your mother snapped those and sent it along to me. I expect she meant it as much as a rebuke as a kindness."

"I expect you're right. Where is that poem from, anyway? I've never known. Did Mom choose it?"

"No. Zak did."

"When?"

"At your Grandfather's funeral. Remember? The funeral home had that book of invocations, and Zak flipped through it, and this poem just fell right out. It had been tucked in there casually. He chilled us all right to the bone when he said, 'This is the poem _I _want read when _I _die.' And we might have forgotten all about it, but he kept it, and he told Kara about it, and she gave that same sheet of paper back to your mom in the days after the crash."

Lee squinted at the picture, not that he needed to. He knew the poem on Zak's headstone by heart.

_I have left these worlds—no life remains,_  
><em>But love, the physician who'll tend your pains,<em>  
><em>Abides, and wounds, and lingers on,<em>  
><em>And where you feel it, I am not gone.<em>

_Memories fade—but where they take new wing,_  
><em>It's because I am the center of Orpheus's ring;<em>  
><em>And I am the Arrow of Apollo's tip<em>  
><em>Jutting from the stern of sorrow's ship,<em>  
><em>And when you sing anew, although you mourn,<em>  
><em>I am the cry of Cronus's horn.<em>

_When the worst of grief at last has healed_  
><em>Know that I was the iron in Atlas's shield;<em>  
><em>And if love at last shall set you free,<em>  
><em>Your chains were broken at last, by me.<em>

Lee was still feeling through what his father was trying to tell him, by giving him this picture. His heart had settled—it understood—but his brain was still working on it. "I've been thinking about the Arrow of Apollo lately." Lee set the picture aside abruptly, blinked back frustrated tears. "Do you still have it?"

"You sound like Leoben Conoy. He comes up here asking about it once a week."

"Well—but do you?"

His father rested his hand's comfortably on his lap. "I do." His tone of finality made it clear that that was as much as he was going to say.

"I see."

"Are you going to run for the presidency, Lee?"

"I don't know." Lee was having a hard time thinking that far ahead, lately. "Do you think I should?"

His father leaned forward in his chair, now, and Lee knew he was about to finally render his judgment. His features stilled. He was calm. He waited.

"Lee," he said carefully, his voice reminding Lee of nothing so much as the day he'd called to tell him his brother was dead, "you know that Kara was here this morning."

"Yeah."

"She comes up most days."

"I know."

"So you know that I'm speaking from experience when I tell you…" his father sighed, and it really sounded like the air coming out of a balloon. He slumped forward. "She looks like Laura did, son. At the end. She's being hunted by death. She doesn't have long. I think you know that."

Lee swallowed the rest of his ambrosia in one gulp, and then stood up and refilled his own glass and his father's. They both sat, identical postures, staring into the green liquid, cloudy and unfiltered here on New Earth. The silence stretched.

"I don't know if Zak would forgive you," Bill Adama finally said. "I can see, now, that you need him to. You and Kara… you carry around this heavy piece of furniture between the two of you, and you look in vain for somewhere to put it down, and it never comes. There's never enough room. That's torture, Lee, and whatever else is true, you don't deserve that. No one who struggles as hard as you have to find ways to love others does."

A fist between Lee's lungs unclenched, at that, and he took in what felt like the first easy breath of his whole life. "If Zak were here…" he began.

Once again, the admiral shook his head. "We used to talk about that. Those first two years. Remember? If Zak were here, this is the joke he'd tell, this is the thing he'd be nagging you about, this is the stunt he'd have pulled. We stopped. Do you know why?"

Lee shook off a shiver. "Why?"

"Because we both know he'd never have survived past the destruction of the Colonies. Even if he'd been on Galactica for my retirement, like you. You know how long he'd've made it?" Bill Adama shook his head. "Well, this is a night for honesty. So I'll tell you what I think. Once the Cylons started coming, I think he'd've made it about thirty-three minutes. Maybe thirty-three more. No longer."

Lee's head fell back, and his eyes closed. The relief and the shame coursing through him were both so potent. Relief, to hear his father say what he'd often thought. Shame, to hear his own thoughts aloud. "He wasn't a pilot."

"No, and I shouldn't have tried to make him one. That's what I live with. That training would have killed him any way you look at it." The swallow he took then was long. "The number of times I've wished for the horn of Cronus to be real so I could go back and apologize to him for that…"

Lee's face crumpled, but he fought valiantly. "Didn't you ever hear the rumors?" He nodded at Bill Adama's stove. "They have it, locked in a safe somewhere at Graystone Industries." He made himself joke. "Along with six original Kobolian masterpieces, the first draft of the Scrolls of Pythia, and a lock of Zeus's hair."

His father managed a smile, at that.

"Your brother was an immature kid when he died. He needed Kara because he had something to prove. To me. They were using each other, really—Kara to convince herself she wouldn't become her mother, Zak to convince himself he could be what I wanted him to." Bill sighed, and then the final judgment came. "It's not fair to sit around waiting for that immature kid to forgive you, Lee. He didn't even know himself. He never got a chance to. But you—you did. Finally. The man you've become… we don't always agree, of course. But, son. I am so proud of the man you've become."

Some of the shackles holding shut memory trunks in the corners of Lee's mind fell away with a thud, at that. _Not guilty. Somehow, after all that._

His father sighed. "And I don't want you to become like me, when… if Kara goes. Sitting up here on a mountaintop… it's all I have left in me. But you—you're destined for more, Lee." His father turned back to the fire, held his hands to it as if to warm them up from these many feet away. "You should be the next president, Lee. You need to have a future, a cause. Promise me."

"I'm about drained of fighting, too, Dad," Lee said quietly, letting himself drop his guard and be honest with his father. "I don't know if I have much left in me."

"Find a cause. Because without one…"

"I know."

Then Lee picked up the photographs again, and his father kept staring into the low, flickering light of the fire. And they sat that way for a long time.


	11. Chimeras

**Lost heat **_**and**_** power at my house this weekend, and I was still bent over my laptop, with its shockingly long battery life, working on this update because I can't seem to quit.**

**To all the students/teachers/folks on an academic calendar out there, hope your year's wrapping up well! (Better, at any rate, than any of the characters below.)**

* * *

><p>They'd had a good time at the beach house, Olivia thought. As she rechecked the landing coordinates from the pilot's chair of the Raptor, she was sorry that she and her husband would be back at camp in a matter of minutes; her guard would have to go back up. She'd have to remember, again, that she was lying.<p>

It didn't feel like a lie, though. All those memories… humans couldn't understand, but she _was_ Sharon Agathon. And others, as well. Just as Sharon Agathon had been, albeit with a different immediacy, and in a different constellation.

Still, that was just ones and zeroes.

She knew in her heart that she _was_ Sharon. Now if she could just convince Hera… and avoid setting foot on the Cylon base star again, ever.

"That's the one good thing about going home," Karl was saying, now. "We'll see how badly Hera freaked Starbuck out while we were gone."

"My money's on Apollo being the frazzled one. Did you see the look he gave Hera when she asked him to draw with her last week? Like she was speaking Leonid." She switched on the landing controls efficiently—no cracks about crash landings today—and began to land the Raptor on the strip alongside Galactica that had been set up for short-range deployments.

"Imagination's never been his long suit. Still, there's fear and there's _fear_, you know?"

Those words were still ringing in Olivia's ears when she deactivated the hatch mechanisms and lowered the stairway.

It occurred to her later that if she'd been watching the corners and the launch tubes, she would have seen all the Marines crouching in the corners, quite visible even in black because the sun was so brilliantly bright.

She saw them when the door opened, though, and, to her credit, nothing but the truth ever occurred to her: they had come for her.

How was it that now—now that it was over—her heart was so steady?

The Marines ringed the Raptor, and at the center of them, she thought, was Leoben Conoy. It probably was; it made sense that it would be Conoy coming for her. But lately she had a hard time telling the Twos apart.

"Olivia Valerii," he began, and the words shot like a scared bird across her brain. _How did he know?_ "Under the authority of the Cylon Central Council, you're under arrest."

"What the…" Helo ran out of words quickly as he was suddenly out of breath to utter them. He'd heard her name. Her worst fear. _He'd heard her name! _And now he was frozen in the Raptor behind her as cuffs were roughly slammed onto her wrists.

"Don't do this to him," Olivia was pleading, but calmly. "Please. I'm all he has left of her."

Helo was rapidly catching up. "Is she… what is she… what is she accused of, Conoy?"

Leoben turned unpitying eyes on him. "Identity theft. Fraud. And the murder of Sharon Agathon."

Olivia didn't see Karl's face crumple at that, but she had, burning in those memories she carried with her, an image of him as he'd once prepared to shoot her—to shoot his wife—to shoot… oh, God, she didn't even know. Which of them had he shot, that time? The memory of the terrified look on his face, the terror and the determination and the deep, unsinkable self-loathing… those memories were not _not_ hers.

And she imagined his face looked the same now.

She wanted to howl, but here, at the end of a brief, grand experiment in having a normal life, she knew there was nothing she could say. She didn't understand what she'd done any better than Karl did.

* * *

><p><em>One month later<em>

"Doc Cottle's finished running the samples from the amnio and all of the scans and he says everything's still proceeding normally." Gaius spoke in a flood as he came in their newly-installed front door. He didn't announce himself. His eyes were a tad wild.

His wife's calm expression didn't flicker. "But you weren't satisfied, so you ran the samples yourself," she supplied for him.

He smiled tightly. "Exactly right." Pulling the lab data he'd compiled out of his jacket, he fanned it out on the coffee table in front of her. "And there's…darling, don't panic, but there's an… irregularity."

How did she manage to roll her eyes without actually rolling them? "A half-Cylon half-human child is by definition irregular. What are you comparing him to? Hera? Because a sample size of one doesn't exactly…"

"Thank you, my dear, perhaps you'd like to explain the scientific method, because I'm not sure I'm _familiar_…"

"Fine." The expressionless eye roll again, but there was wariness in those eyes, now. "What did you find out?"

"Well. Simply put—hush, I know you're more than capable of understanding the complicated version, let's not have this fight again. Let me just say—_simply_ put, he's retained two distinct sets of DNA."

She grasped it quickly, as he'd known she would. "_A chimera_."

"Exactly right, yes. Not… not quite a hybrid. His whole body is a mosaic, with your DNA walled up cozily around mine throughout, but not _intermingled_. Biologically male, yes, but not a human-slash-Cylon, more accurately a… human _and _Cylon, at once." He swallowed. "And yes, different from Hera, our sample size of one."

Her hand was pressed against our abdomen. "Gaius. What do we do?"

"Well, simple. We—"

"He's still a blessing. Whatever he is—I won't hear of—"

"We _wait_." He crouched down in front of her, and even he didn't know whether he meant it sincerely or for effect when he pressed his hands to either side of her rounded belly and repeated it to the life she had growing in there. "We grow you, and we wait."

Baltar intended to put some contingencies in place, nonetheless.

* * *

><p>"So Sarah Porter has proposed that all Cylons have to… what, systematically delete all of their shared memories?" Kara had one foot propped up on the stool in their kitchen, and was munching on one of those fruits that Lee hadn't had a chance to learn the name of yet, her elbow on her knee.<p>

"She's baiting me. She says that her plan will ensure that Cylons think and behave as _individuals_, and that it would, quote, 'fully humanize them,' end-quote. She's banking her whole campaign on Cylon humanization." Lee was on the floor, doing his last set of push-ups for the day.

"What I don't get is why you're opposing it. Aside from the politics, you know… I mean, c'mon, Apollo, she's not only gotta point, she's got Leoben Conoy and all the Twos on her _side_ about it. Some of the Sixes, too."

"I'll tell you what I told the _Colonial Times_ this morning. If something speaks, bleeds, cries, and laughs, it's already human. And on principle, it isn't the business of the state to make humans, but to recognize them." He heaved himself off his hands and onto his back and began his last set of crunches. "Furthermore, her whole plan is a pathetic, cowardly attempt to appease the anti-Cylon contingent, and Kara, you know as well as I do that those people can't be appeased. They think the Cylons are machines, they blame them for the genocide, and they're coming to fear _all_ technology. There's nothing Cylons can give up that they'll accept and say 'debt paid'."

He was surprised to find she wasn't taunting him—it was rare she let him monologue this long without calling into question the purpose of government, the value of citizenship, and the appeal of talking earnestly about any of it. But she was just chewing the last of that red fruit thoughtfully. She'd been in a bit of a mood all day.

Lee heaved himself through the last thirty. "Sarah Porter is Conoy's puppet, and his game is something more sinister, something we haven't figured out yet."

Kara nodded, and her eyes were dark. He noticed her studious effort to stop them from wandering down to his chest, and almost laughed. That long blade of sexual tension hanging over them—she sharpened it whenever she could get away with seeming not to be trying to. It had all been going on too long. Always arm's length, but never more than an arm. It was funny because the way it hurt had become so predictable.

"Helo's in favor of it. Cylon humanization, I mean," she said abstractedly. _But you convinced me, _she was saying. Or else _I don't want to fight you anymore, _which was a lot of what she'd been saying, lately, and it got to him. Some nights he picked fights with her just to remind her she wasn't fragile, as terrifying as it was that she needed that reminder. And to open a valve on that sexual tension, a valve that they both could live with. And because sometimes they both just needed to yell. He did, anyway.

"Gods, Lee, it's all so frakked up. Did he tell you he wants to delete Olivia Valerii's memories personally? Before she's executed, I mean?"

"She hasn't been found guilty yet."

"You think she won't be?"

"Of impersonation and fraud? Sure. Murder? I don't know." He sighed. "I do know the decision in that case could swing the whole election." He concentrated on the tent wall in front of him. "Depending on how closely it coincides with voting."

Unlike everyone else in the camp, he'd never asked Kara when the temple would be finished. It was arguably more important a question to him than to anyone else in camp—it would determine the election date, and his whole future—but he knew Kara thought that finishing the temple would be the culmination of her destiny. That something would happen to her then. And he had no reasons left to doubt her instincts. So he'd never even considered asking.

"I'm going to make an announcement tomorrow," she whispered now. Toe to temple, he clenched. "Six weeks from now, I think. On the Feast of Artemis."

His jaw was frozen. "That'll make Conoy happy."

"Lee—"

"Gives you some time to work out a farewell speech. Do I get a note this time? Or just another 'catch ya on the other side' and you'll go on your merry way?"

"Damn it, Lee. You seriously think that I can fight this and I just, what, ignore all the signs and the calls and the _feeling_? Are you insane? Don't you think, if I thought I could fight it and _win_—that we could…" She trailed off.

"You can't even _say_ what you'd win, Kara, let alone fight for it." He crossed to the table and grabbed her shoulders. "Right now, tonight. You and I stock up provisions, fill up a Raptor, and we fly away from here. See this world. Settle on some island somewhere. No politics, no Cylons, no destinies. Just us for us." He held her dark eyes in his light ones.

She bent her head so it was almost touching his chin. "What would you even do if I said yes?" she whispered. "Even if it worked, you'd never forgive me."

"Is that what you tell yourself?"

"And it wouldn't work. You can't outrun destiny."

"Yeah, well, especially not if you run toward it with open arms."

"But I have a… proposition." Kara bit her lip, and Lee could see she was afraid. He could feel the race of blood starting in his wrists. "Spend the last six weeks with me, Lee?"

He let that sink in a minute, then swung away from her so he wouldn't have to look at her and refuse her at the same time.

"Are you asking to move in together? 'Cause I'm not sure I'm ready to move all my stuff the full _four feet _to your side of the—"

"Stop it. I'm serious." She drew in a deep breath. "Gods, Lee, you know I'm not good at this. I'm trying to say… I'm trying to say…"

"I know what you're trying to say." He put his hand on his stomach as if he were going to be sick. "You want me to visit my dad with you in the mornings. And visit you on-site at the temple in the middle of the day, just to say that I missed you. And you—very badly—want me to sleep with you at night."

"I don't just frak at night."

"That's all you want, for your last six weeks. You want me to pretend I'm basically your husband, that this whole thing between us hasn't been just a long frakked-up series of mistakes, just keep pretending so we can forget sometimes that none of it's real. And so it _kills_ me when you—" He stopped himself. "That's literally all you want. A six-week-long _fantasy_ before it's all over forever."

She sounded like she had when he'd found her in the brig, the day of his old man's retirement ceremony, a thousand years ago. Insolent, angry. Underneath it, bottomlessly sad. "It's all I get, Lee."

Lee began systematically cursing every human who had brought him to this irreducible moment, when—finally—there was no choice to be made that wouldn't destroy both of them. He didn't believe in all the Elementary Psych bullshit that they'd spoon-fed him at War College, but there was a hard fact at the center of this crossroads, and that was that her father hadn't been willing to engage in any kind of pretense that would have allowed him to _stay_, for her. What he knew of Kara's mother made his blood run cold, but her father… if Lee ever met the man in Elysium, he guaranteed he wouldn't be able to stop himself from decking him. Kara had been desperately pretending since the day he'd left and her gods had fallen out of the sky.

No one had ever protected him, either. No one had dressed up either of their childhoods with any illusions at all.

And that realization was enough of an answer. He was conscious of it as an instinct, but trusted it anyway. So he enclosed his arms around her now, squeezing her tight up against his whole body, and if he hadn't done it, he wouldn't have felt her heart racing, felt the very faint convulsion that shook through her. Her teeth sink into his shoulder, gently, and stayed there.

And he smiled.

"Then we'll pretend." They all but melted into each other, at that. And it was suddenly easy, all of it. He lowered his mouth to touch hers for the first time in—gods, how long, and how had he done so long without it? Both electric and comforting, to feel her lips against his and her hands kneading his shoulders and drifting down his back.

Who had he been kidding? What walls were there between them that had ever been real? Hadn't the distance been the pretense?

"You mean it?" she asked, and her voice was husky but her eyes had a hard demand in them. _In or out, Apollo. Don't frak with me this time._

"I'm in."

They raced, hands clutching at each other, to the bed, ignoring the papers spread out on the foot of it in their hurry, ignoring the few inches of sunlight sneaking through the barely-open tent doorway, ignoring, as they stripped down, the faint chill in the air that signaled that winter was coming. They were in a holy place, now. Skin like magnets, drawing long fingers to long muscles, soft mouths to soft knees, teeth to bone, old longing to sacred centers.

He wanted her, wanted her, wanted her—as she said more and meant faster, as he rushed inside her, as they consumed each other. She was surer and sweeter and he was kinder and saner than either of them had ever been while naked and together. On New Caprica, their lack of control had been sudden and mad, and on the algae planet, it had been slow and shameful, but the control behind the wildness, now, was righteous and vital and in keeping with the regular, even pace of real time.

When their hips stilled and their hearts slowed, and they were sprawled together stroking slow, shaky hands all along the length of each other, the whole crashing lie of the next six weeks that Lee had agreed to felt to him like the _end_ of a long disaster.

She took a breath against his neck, and his body was still so sensitive that he had to fight to control his shudder. "Lee. If… this is the rest of my life—then this is—_you _are—"

He squeezed her shoulder, and his own eyes shut. "I know."

There was a question she was answering that he kept locked up in a vault. _I mean what if this… _this_… is the rest of your life, Kara? Is this how you want to spend it? Who you want to spend it with? _She'd said she loved him that night on New Caprica like someone yelling to a hostage taker to shoot her instead of a child. And it didn't escape his attention that she couldn't make it through her point any better, now.

_This is all I get, too. _

He buried his mouth and nose in her hair and stayed there.


	12. Paradox

"All right, I'm here, Baltar." Lee stepped into the room, strategically hiding his lingering uneasiness at being in the heart of a a Cylon basestar behind crossed arms and a grim expression. "Mind telling me what 'global security issue' compelled me to sneak in here in the middle of the night?"

"Of course. Have a seat." The sleeves of Gaius Baltar's lab coat were pushed up to his elbows. He was intently bent over a computer monitor that had been awkwardly patched into the Cylon system. Lee obliged him, easing down onto a stool, but Gaius was still absorbed by the stream of numbers and letters flying across the screen. The silence stretched. Lee grew rapidly impatient.

"If you don't mind, I have—"

"An election to lose? I know, that's what makes this matter so urgent."

Lee's brows shot up, though the conventional wisdom that he was about to lose this election wasn't exactly news to him. "The election is still a week away."

"Well, forgive me, President Adama, for not knowing that you were counting on the surefire science-and-reason vote to win the day against a bunch of shamans selling blood grudges. And at the last minute, of course." Baltar had never been known for veiling his sarcasm. "You're down twelve points in the polls, and this despite, or rather, because of, the fact that you're living in sin with the people's angel of salvation. Which, I take it, is why you're so irritated to find yourself here in the middle of the night."

Lee rolled his eyes impatiently. Kara hadn't even been in bed yet, was still tied up at the temple with final projects, and when she got back, she'd probably want to go for an endurance run, recite proverbs from the Scrolls of Pythia, repaint the kitchen table, or any of the other half dozen activities she used to hold her burgeoning panic at bay. Sex… between the two of them, it was a compulsion, and an exhilarating one, but not the kind of easy pleasure Baltar was imagining. It certainly didn't help either of them manage their _fear_.

The question was, why was Baltar foraying into his mess with Kara, after all this time? He felt the slow heat of irritation building in the veins in his wrists, but he kept his tone moderate. "I appreciate your _advice_ about my campaign, Baltar, now—"

"Or is Kara too busy with her—I'm sorry, do you two still call him her husband now that he's the hybrid for a big hunk of stone, or is he more of a robot-slash-oracle?"

Lee's eyes turned to ice and he got back to his feet. Sam had been moved into the temple the day before, which gave him the chills for reasons he didn't care to discuss with Gaius frakking Baltar. "Call me when you have something substantial to discuss."

"Oh, but as I recall, Kara Thrace is very substantial." Gaius let the meaning of his words sink in. "Parts of her are very substantial, indeed."

Lee couldn't have stopped his fist from finding Baltar's face if Baltar had been hiding in a darkroom on the other side of the moon. Even if he'd thought about it, and it was strange to think that he hadn't, he wouldn't have tried to stop himself. This was an old wound Baltar was opening, one Lee had almost forgotten about as other scars had accumulated.

One Colonial Day morning-after, Lee had let himself become hotly, absurdly jealous of this man in a way that he'd never let himself become jealous of Kara's partners. Because that was the first night in a long time when he'd thought things might change.

The man staggered several feet and then fell into the stool he'd been sitting on, crashing to the ground with it. Cupping his jaw, he stared up at Lee with astonishment. "Glad to know Lee Adama reacts to adversity with calm, cool reason—"

"Yeah, well, Lee Adama's done reacting to you at all, Baltar." Lee turned on his heel as Gaius scrambled back to his feet.

"Wait! Wait. Lee—President Adama. I owe you an apology, very sincerely. I…" Baltar sighed. "I'm afraid this election is taking its toll on me, as well. To be honest, my wife is quite—frightened. By Cylon humanization, that is. She's afraid that she won't be herself, if she has all her sisters' memories deleted. That she won't… care about the same things."

_That she won't love you anymore. _Lee heard the unspoken words, but they did nothing to lessen his cold, blue anger. "Not my problem, Baltar. Like you said." He bit out the words. "I'm not exactly the poster candidate for family values." He kept walking out the door, but to his annoyance, Baltar followed, rapidly realizing he was going to have to back-track to regain Lee's support.

"Look. I know that you've never been my… greatest fan. Your soliloquy at my trial, what was it you said? I'm arrogant, and weak, and a coward."

Lee's face was still, watching him warily.

"And maybe you're right. I believed that I had become someone different, someone… braver, after the Battle of the Colony. But here I sit in this lab, night after night, running samples over and over again because I'm terrified that my son might be…" He cut himself off, and Lee could hear the man's cowardice crystal clear.

"Might be what, Gaius?"

Baltar's expression tightened. "There's no one else—no other human, anyway—I can trust with what I'm about to tell you. I assure you that humanity's future is utterly tied up in it. Come back in and listen." Lee didn't blink. "Please." Baltar forced out the word.

So Lee returned, and sat, frowning, and then squinting in astonishment, as Baltar walked him through the samples and what he believed they indicated. A half hour later, he leaned back against the metal edge of the table. "So you think," he said slowly, "that your son's blood will have similar healing effects to Hera's, but that it will be…?"

"More volatile," said Baltar. "The Cylon and human material in Hera's DNA have blended. That means that when, for example, Hera's blood was used to treat Laura Roslin's cancer, it had an ameliorative effect that was the equivalent of a tune-up. Cells were patched up, toxins flushed out, and Laura's system was…optimized, so that her own immune system could most effectively combat the malignancies. That it was reliant on Laura's system strength is why it failed to work when we tried it a second time, after the cancer returned."

"And your son's tissue is programmed to actively combat, what, alien tissues?"

"Because the Cylon and human cells are being biologically trained to act cooperatively while remaining separate, they're…" He paused, seeming to try to work out how to express this to Lee in a way he'd understand. "They're in an alliance. Cylon and human. And they will take on all comers. Including, as I just showed you, viruses, cancers, funguses… Aero—my son has a kind of super-immunity, general throughout his body."

"And you can manufacture this biological material in a host of types."

"Yes. It was quite simple, once I had a sample."

"So… I don't understand the problem. I mean—it's a miracle." Lee's eyes were looking inward, seemed to be dawning. "We announce to humankind that disease itself is—is over. And you—you're a hero to this and every generation that follows."

"Don't be naïve. Strictly speaking, disease isn't over. Super-bacteria, various already-existent strands of particular bacteria that the body doesn't recognize as pathogenic… but the science isn't the issue. The point is that this situation can only go one of three ways _politically_."

You could trust Gaius Baltar to always already understand the bottom line. That he was patronizing about it was the icing on his ever-present cake of deviousness. "Which you see as…?"

"The first possibility: it could save your candidacy. I announce it at a press conference with you, you campaign as the man whose administration presided over the end of disease." He paused. "This, to say the least, is an unlikely scenario."

"Because…?"

"Because Sarah Porter will fight back. So the second, vastly likelier option is that she wins in a landslide by rebranding your administration's scientific breakthrough as a miracle from the gods, rather than from science. She and Conoy christen Aero as the herald of the era of Cylon humanity, and my son grows up as the next Angel of Humanity—the next Kara Thrace. Which, as you know, is no kind of life at all."

The dawn in Lee's eyes had already dusked, but now they were becoming night again. "And third?"

"The most likely scenario is that they see the manufacturing of a biological cure as a new kind of Cylon menace, both because it aids your chances and because it reminds them of something they abhor—the idea that technology is a solution, rather than a problem. They vow, if elected, to destroy it. They succeed. And my son is, ever after, pariah, a freak of science, a living threat at the center of a volatile war that flares up with every new epidemic."

Lee sifted through those scenarios swiftly. "So you're rooting for the first, and that's why I'm here. We need to find a way to raise its odds."

"Unfortunately, no. The calculus is too far out of your favor. You're out of political options, Mr. President. I'm here because I have a fourth option. And I've invited you in your capacity as a good citizen… as well as a man who is likely to revert from the presidency to head of the colonial military in a few short days."

Lee hadn't let himself think about whether he'd resume a post as military commander. He hadn't thought past the election. It felt like there was no future there to think toward.

Gaius leaned down into a cabinet under the table, and pulled out a miniature cooling unit about the size of Lee's hand—the hand into which he pressed it. "We can't save your candidacy. But we can save my son. By never telling anyone where this came from."

"What the hell is this?"

"It's a vial of blood extracted from his umbilical cord in utero. You can do with it what you like. Store it where you like. Announce and explain it how you like. God willing, you can use it to cure whomever you like. But until a way to use it is clear, you'll protect it however you can." Gaius cleared his throat nervously. "Meanwhile, I am going to destroy every trace of my research and protect my son from all further probes and testing."

"So you're abdicating all responsibility for the most potent remedy in human history."

"To you. Yes."

"Why me? Since I'm going to lose—why not Hoshi, or Helo—hell, just keep it between you and your wife?"

"Because of your actions at my trial, of course. Your speech—"

Lee remembered the murderous loathing that had crawled across Baltar's face during that speech, and the resentment that had followed, and discarded that explanation out of hand. "The real reason."

Gaius looked over his shoulder for a long time. "I'm trying to be a better man. A bit more honest—although nobody's perfect, you know… and to have a lot more nerve, more courage. I needed a… model, for that."

"And you chose… me?" Lee asked faintly. He didn't kid himself; he was a tall step above Gaius Baltar in terms of resolve, but…

"No, no, of course not. I chose Starbuck."

Lee gave a faint smile at that. "So you want me to give this to Kara."

"No. She's too brash. No, the point is that Kara believes you're the man for this job." Gaius paused, seeming to consider his next words: whether he should say them, what would be the advantage, perhaps what Starbuck's bravery would demand. Then he plunged ahead. "There was a night, several years ago, when I briefly had the pleasure of Kara's… company. Until, at a particularly critical juncture in the evening, she called out someone else's name." He met Lee's eyes, now. "Yours."

Lee's eyebrows shot up and an electric jolt of satisfaction struck him, with a wave of guilt cresting right after it. The charged feeling of knowing he was wanted, had been wanted, at a moment when Kara couldn't possibly have been playacting or pretending. That he hadn't been the only one.

The guilty feeling of knowing her secret, knowing how exposed and vulnerable she would feel if she knew that he knew.

"She said, that night, that she'd left you and come to me because you were too good for her. Not that you were honorable, exactly, but that you _wanted_ to be, and that you really believed in 'honor and bullshit like that.' She was… she was honest enough to know that her standards were not yours, brave enough to credit you with what she couldn't manage. Following Starbuck, I'd like to say the same."

Lee looked at the cooling unit in his hand, thought about how maddening Kara's idea of him was, how maddening Baltar's was, now. How much it was all a cage. He squeezed his hands around it, recalling that his father used to say that every man had as much responsibility as he could bear. The near-universal cure he held in his hand might be stretching his store a bit far. "I have no idea what the frak I'm going to do," he said honestly.

"Well, I trust you'll figure it out with integrity and intelligence." Gaius turned back to his computer and began systematically deleting files. "Don't let me down."

He didn't look up, but the blood carelessly dried on the corner of his mouth and the steel in his voice that told Lee he'd come a long way toward becoming the man he was imagining he could be.

* * *

><p>Sitting on the floor and leaning back against Sam's basin, which she'd moved into the transept of the temple earlier that morning, Kara was thinking of paradoxes.<p>

The temple was riddled with them. Spare and simple, with a single row of gleaming gray columns encircling a center cella arranged in an X that met at right angles, it was nevertheless, formally, a monument to the advanced civilization that all thirteen tribes had inherited from Kobol. Inside, bionic wall plaster supplied from the base star, flickering lights and exposed wires from Galactica and its fleet, and long, low wooden benches from trees harvested in the forests north of the camp, dramatized the amalgam that was their new civilization. Human and machine. Living tissue and cold stone.

Lee would say that they were contradictions, not real paradoxes. He didn't believe in them. He'd told her last night. _True paradoxes are impossible, Kara. It's how I know you're not dead, not really. That you're _alive_ is evidence enough._

His eyes had looked flatly sure, but they hadn't held hers for very long.

Kara did believe in paradoxes. Or at least, forces that were countervailing and equal, utterly reliant on each other and utterly ruinous to each other. Liberty and security. Passion and reason. Momentum and friction. Miracle and tragedy.

Her and Lee.

"So I guess that's _eight_ things I can't explain about what happened, Sam," she wrapped up another "conversation" with Sam in his hybrid bath. They were usually about the same things: how she was sorry. What had happened to her. What was going to happen to everyone once she was gone.

His unresponsive directives had changed hardly a jot since the Chief had hooked him up here, to the electrical grid of the shrine, and through it, the rest of the camp, rather than the system hub of a battlestar. Thank the gods the Chief had bought into her scheme. It felt _right _to Kara that Sam should be here. Like a puzzle piece had moved into perfect, satisfying place.

"One, I saw a Raider that no one else could see. Two, my plane exploded—or that's what Lee saw" she swallowed hard here, again, "—but it both did and didn't kill me. Three, I got transported through some kind of wormhole—even though wormholes are only theories and no one's ever seen one!—to Cylon Earth. Where my body…"

Sam was unimpressed by her meandering through the vagaries of her destiny, it seemed; he patiently continued to maintain all the temple systems, rudimentary though they were. "Adjust underboard fuse. Check primary pilot light. Check secondary pilot light. Check tertiary pilot light…"

She tilted her head back onto the rim of Sam's basin. "Four. That vision with my mother. It seemed so real, it _couldn't_ have been a hallucination. But who was that man? Why did he look like Leoben? If it was real for me, was it real for her, too?"

No one heard the note of longing in her voice, at that moment; Sam because his mind was elsewhere, and Kara because she had long since buried that particular hatchet she'd carried for too long, or so she deeply believed. Buried it right in her mother's neck.

"Five is that I saw _this_ Earth, even though I crashed on the Cylon Earth. I don't even remember seeing it, really… it's more like someone told me about a dream, whispered it to me while _I _was asleep, so it got stuck in my head." She could hear her own telling, as if itself from a dream: _Big blue oceans, fluffy white clouds. You're gonna love it, Lee, I promise_.

She could have been describing any planet that would sustain human life.

Sam paid her no mind.

"Set timer to dim perimeter light. The ghosts linger in the feast halls. The seconds and the years carry each other away. He will choose between the bean and the soil, and in the midst of confusion, he will find her again. Set timer to dim interior light. End of line."

Kara knew she should be reaching for her notebook and writing these lines down, but she was just so frakking tired of trying to _decipher_ everything. She grasped, dimly, that there was something hopeful in Sam's most recent riddle, and something familiar, but there had been too much of that for too long. It slipped from the edges of her brain. "Six," she continued wearily. "I lost two months of time in six hours. I skipped a few months of my life. And seven is that frakking brand-new Viper I came back in, when I did, which was tuned to Cylon Earth." She wrapped her arms around her middle, remembering the fear on the admiral's face, on everyone's, almost, when they'd seen her again. How afraid she'd been for herself. "Eight is the godsdamned song being a perfect code, and my father having written it…"

"Raise exterior lights. Raise interior lights."

Kara heard footsteps and soft voices, and purely on instinct, rolled down on her stomach on the far side of Sam's basin. _Frak, why did I leave the house today without a gun?_

Her conscious mind quickly apprehended what her subconscious already had: they had two visitors, and they were Leoben Conoy and another Two, Caleb, who'd been working on building the temple with Kara. Kara didn't know why she was hiding; part of it was that she didn't want anyone to see her talking to Sam in the middle of the night. Part of it was that it was Conoy, how he made her feel—like she had to work triple-time even to muster the courage to hide from him, instead of just running like her nerves were screaming for her to.

"The statue will be installed here," Leoben was saying.

"And you have the arrow?"

"I do."

"The Old Man didn't put up a fight about it?"

"The Old Man doesn't know about it. He should have found a better hiding place." He paused. "But keep it quiet. No statue until the night of. Ten days before the election is a bad time to rock any waters, particularly with the military. God knows they're all on Lee Adama's payroll." Kara tensed further. "Once the arrow's here, the horn will follow. They belong in a holy place, and they belong together. The pattern demands it."

"This place won't be holy if it's left up to her and her pagan _gods_."

Leoben's voice chilled. "She's the only holy human being left alive, Caleb. She led us here. Her statue will lead us to the horn. And once we have the horn…"

"We can make everything right again. Fix the pattern. I know." Caleb sounded troubled. "Do you… do you think Daniel knew it was us?"

"It doesn't matter." Leoben's convivial confidence rattled Kara, and she clenched her teeth against it. "Soon enough, it won't have been us."

Their footsteps, heavy on the stone and heavier as they echoed among the colonnades, faded slowly.

"How am I supposed to keep the horn out of their hands? Or am I? Is my destiny _their _destiny?" She whispered to Sam. "What the frak do they want to do with the horn?"

Kara scowled. The same questions, over and over, and the answers never came. "Night, Sam," she finally muttered, figuring it was safe to slip out, "see you tomorrow."

"Reactivate defense perimeter settings. New line…"

Kara's heart was in her throat as she scuttled down the back steps of the temple and back to the tent she and Lee called home. The tent was conspicuous now that it was the only non-permanent dwelling in the whole central colony.

Her mind was racing. Maybe she could get Lee to play triad with her until dawn. Then she'd be out of her mind with tiredness, would frak him senseless and get a few hours' sleep.

When she came inside, she wasn't surprised to see Lee sitting up, his shoes off but otherwise fully dressed, leafing through a sheaf of papers at the edge of their bed. He looked up, took quick stock of her harried restiveness, and started pulling on his shoes.

"Wanna go to the firing range with me?" he asked.

"It's oh-three-hundred hours, Lee," she said mildly, but she was already reaching down to open their gun safe, and her eyes were glowing. She frowned to see the cooling unit on the shelf above their handguns. "What's that?"

"Oh, nothing. Just some… experiment that Baltar's been working on," Lee said slowly.

Kara made a face. "Baltar? Probably toxic, then." She grinned. "He hasn't ruined a civilization in _months_, so he's probably due."

His smile was strained, so Kara took matters into her own hands. She was good at, if nothing else in the world, distracting Lee Adama.

"Hey. Apollo. Head's up."

"Lords, Kara!" Lee grabbed the pistol she tossed him by its barrel with one hand. "Didn't anyone teach you not to _throw_ handguns?"

"Relax, Major, it's not loaded. I think." She was grinning harder now that the anxiety had lifted out of his eyes. "Didn't anyone ever teach you that a stick up your ass is bad for your health?"

He settled in. "You know, I've noticed your preoccupation with my ass lately, Lieutenant, and it's something I've been meaning to discuss with you…"

"Anytime, Admiral. I'd also be happy to discuss any other of your body parts you're concerned I might be fixating on."

He laughed, and she saw the faintest blush sweep his face. It might have just been that he was happy; she'd seen it too infrequently to say for sure. And then he started offering suggestions.

The handful of colonials who were still awake heard Lee Adama and Kara Thrace laughing uproariously on their way to the firing range on the outskirts of the camp at an ungodsly hour. "Probably drunk," grunted Saul Tigh to his wife as the pilots hooted past their open front window. Ellen just smiled.

Chief Galen Tyrol heard them, too, and his reading was more charitable than Saul's; he was relieved that they were, for once, sinking ammunition into paper hearts rather than human ones.

It wasn't a foregone conclusion.

He'd begun to think that he was the only one who'd noticed that there was a war brewing.

* * *

><p>Helo felt the disgust in his gut and his knees as a military guard let him into Olivia Valerii's cell. Disgust, and fear, mingled with something more bitter and corrosive.<p>

"You came," she said quietly, tonelessly. Her eyes were grave, and they had an odd light in them, of something like kindness. She didn't ask why he'd come now, just before dawn on some regular morning, days after her trial had ended, months after she'd been arrested.

He sat down across the metal table from her. "I'd like for you to describe to me the last several minutes of my wife's life."

It was abrupt. He felt abrupt. It was the dread. He'd practiced saying it calmly, but there was no helping it. He wasn't calm.

Her eyes, those soft, kind eyes, darkened. "No," she said evenly. "I won't do that to you."

"_That's _where you're going to draw the line of what you'll do to me?" he choked.

She reached a hand across the table, as if to clasp his, but he was much too far away. Her sigh was heavy. "It's not your fault, you know."

"I know. It's _yours. _Obviously, undoubtedly, one thousand percent yours."

"That you can't tell us apart, I mean."

Helo blanched.

"You have to forgive yourself, Karl. We can't tell _each other_ apart unless we're on board a base star or close to a network hub."

"I can frakking tell you're not my wife."

"No. You couldn't," she said, very gently. "You know that. Sharon knew it. Think, Karl. You were in love with _Boomer_ before you ever met Athena. If Boomer had noticed you…"

"Shut up. Just shut up! I don't want to hear anything from you except _what happened to my wife._"

She sighed again. "I can see you're not going to be talked out of this."

Helo relaxed; she was going to tell him. But then the next wave of doubt came. Could he handle this? For the first time since he'd decided, finally, to confront her, he doubted his own intentions.

"Here goes." She took a delicate sip of the water in front of her. "We burst into the CIC and were met by open fire from Captain Markson and two men. That first wave of bullets caught Athena in the chest. I didn't notice, because I was intent on subduing the captain. I eliminated… I killed him." Another sip, this one more of a gulp. "By the time I saw she'd been injured, she was already bleeding out. She pleaded for me to help, but it was already too late."

"I know all of this," he growled. "I was at the godsdamned trial."

"Then why are you torturing yourself? What do you expect to hear?"

Karl Agathon pounded his giant fists on the table, at that. "I want to know if she forgave me, godsdamnit! What did she say? Tell me what she said!"

"Forgave you?" Olivia was, by temperament, unflappable, and she merely blinked in surprise, now. "For screwing Boomer and not noticing she wasn't your wife? It's not the kind of thing a woman—or a man—forgives, Karl. She loved you anyway, of course."

"Did she say that? At the end?"

Olivia frowned. Now that she thought about it, Sharon Agathon hadn't said a word about either her husband or her daughter, at the end. "No. She ordered me to help her. She was frustrated that I wasn't helping her, told me that I wasn't a toaster. And then she died."

Karl hung his head low for a long while. When he finally spoke, though he was speaking to the floor, his words shocked unshockable Olivia Valerii. "She's not dead."

"Oh, _gods_. Karl…."

"She's not. She didn't say—what she said she would say. The night of Laura Roslin's funeral, she said that if she died, her last words…" He cut himself off. "I'm holding onto them, because they're probably one of the only memories of hers you don't have." He held tightly to those words, in his chest. "But here's the other clue, Olivia. Why would Athena burst into a room she suspected of being a hiding spot for armed rebels? She's brave, but she's not stupid. She'd have kept her cover as she went in, if she went in at all. Protocol says to wait for backup. She's a vet. She knows the military's not like the movies."

"Helo," Olivia's tone was like a child speaking to a frightened lamb. "We all know that. We _all_ have her memories." But then Olivia frowned, looking troubled. "Well, all of us reborn _after_ her last downloads…"

Helo laughed. "You think it's that simple, don't you? You have her memories, you're the same. I'm going to prove that it's not. An Eight masquerading as my wife died in that CIC. You took _her_ place. And _that's_ why I've thought—ever since a few days after Laura Roslin's funeral, before you ever showed up in my life—that there was something odd about Sharon. You're the _second _impostor, Olivia."

"It's possible," she breathed. "But not likely. Karl, the number of people Athena would have to fool… I mean, trust me… And even if there was a first impostor, _she _might have killed Sharon herself."

"Maybe. But maybe Sharon's alive, and she's hiding among the Eights. And I'm going to find her, and recognize her, and bring her the frak home." His heart was racing, and he felt like himself for the first time in months. _Where's your teddy bear loyalty?_ Kara had asked him weeks ago, when he'd been doubting his marriage to this woman, this fraud. Starbuck'd always accused him of having a teddy bear core. He'd played it off, but he'd always thought she was right, thought it had been bedrock. Since they'd gotten to Earth, it'd been badly shaken, misdirected to a woman—to women!—to whom it didn't belong, and then it had gotten lost altogether.

But here it was again, thank the gods.

Olivia's eyes were wide on his face, now, and he couldn't tell if she was terrified for him or of him. "When's your execution?" he asked her briskly, as if asking when her next dental check-up was. Her verdict—guilty on all counts—had come down three days before.

She shrugged, and he was surprised to feel a twinge of pity at the flash of anguish in her eyes. "It's at the discretion of the next administration. My guess is they'll act quickly—just after the Feast of Artemis."

Helo nodded, and rapped on the door for the guards. He wasn't surprised to see her angrily and surreptitiously wiping a tear from her eyes. She was his wife's sister, after all, and their whole family saw crying as not only a sign of weakness, but one of indelible shame.

Maybe it was his reflecting on family; Helo intended his next words to sound cold, but Olivia heard the involuntary comfort in them.

"I'll be there," he said steadily.


	13. Magical Thinking, Part 1

On the morning of election day, Bill Adama wore non-military formal attire for the first time in two decades. It was also the first time in several weeks he had headed down to camp.

He was going to vote for his son.

The feel of the key in the front door lock was still strange to him—a pull of the door and a jiggle of silver metal that had not yet become familiar with frequent practice. He didn't dwell on the strangeness of it. He'd already done this just enough times to have remembered the other doors, in the lost civilization across the universe, those doors he'd used enough thousands of times to make this process of locking and unlocking entirely normal, those doors which, now irradiated or incinerated and in any case, closed forever, made the new doors, like everything new here, painful.

Walking down the hillside, he permitted himself one glance over his shoulder at the weather vane atop his house. What he saw made his heart skip a beat. The wind was blowing in from the south, up toward the giant mountain range overlooking the new settlement. But the weather vane, impervious to it, was pointing due west. Toward the camp itself.

Bill Adama was headed the same way, and after he voted for Lee Adama for president, he thought he'd pay a visit to Sarah Porter, see if he could figure out why Leoben Conoy wanted what he'd thought he'd stolen.

Bill Adama knew Conoy had failed. Because there in that weather vane on top of his house, beneath a layer of lacquer on an artificially lengthened shaft with a new striped fletching and a large faux copper tip, the real Arrow of Apollo remained above the old admiral's house, hidden in plain sight.

Today, he wasn't thinking about those old doors. He was thinking about the wind, which, blessedly, had no history.

Suddenly, though, it seemed to have a future.

* * *

><p>"That's right, just sign in here. ID cards ready, please. One at a time."<p>

Election day was, for Helo, mainly a new opportunity to covertly search for his wife. He was frustrated at the lack of options for searching for Sharon. A few days ago, an investigation into a set of thefts at the secondary school had allowed him to talk to two Eights—one a teacher, another a maintenance worker—but he hadn't gotten a flicker from either of them except a vague sense of pity.

It wouldn't do to be seen to be looking; he might attract still more impostors that way, a nightmare he didn't even want to contemplate. And while he had thought of a few tests, questions he could ask the Eights, so doing would only force the burden of proof onto Sharon herself. If he tried to test her, he would fail _her_ test.

He could also, of course, ask Hera. Helo had realized that she knew exactly where her mother was, and that that was the major reason for her unconcern with Olivia, and the trial. But this, too, would be a hollow victory. At least, for Sharon, it would be—if she were really out there, if she were really testing him.

So he found himself, on the morning of the election, posted at the entrance table of the universal polling place, the commons building. He could assess all the Eights coming and going, look for a certain swagger, a certain warm, wary light in the eyes meeting his. And not that it mattered—they were too easy to fake—but he could see ID cards along the way.

If he didn't find her, would she ever come to him? To Hera? How long would she stay angry?

"ID cards, ready, please… ah, Chief. What can I help you with?"

Tyrol was clearly not in line to vote. He cocked his head, drawing Helo over to a nearby corner. "Try not to react. We don't want to create a panic. But Major Hoshi sent me to tell you that there's been a break-in at the arms locker…"

* * *

><p>Gaius stepped out of the polling booth briskly, waited a moment for his heavily pregnant wife to emerge from the booth beside him.<p>

"So who'd you vote for?" he asked dryly. Caprica raised expressive eyebrows.

"I'll never understand why the Twos are supporting this humanization absurdity," she murmured, her voice low because these days she was always cognizant that there were listeners all around. "They stand to lose as much as the rest of us."

He wrapped an arm around her waist. "If you win the district representative race—as I'm sure you will—then you'll have a chance at defeating it."

Actually, Gaius wasn't at all sure she would win. He especially hadn't been sure this morning when he'd woken up to a knife in his front door, pinning to it a note with a fairly plain message: "The next Cylon holocaust is coming here first."

He'd taken it down before she could see it, but it hadn't been the first, and he suspected she'd done the same on his behalf on more than one occasion.

There was a violence—an angry energy—that interim President Lee Adama's conscientious posture of inclusivity, politics of social reconstruction, and insistence on full Cylon pardon had contained, up until now. But come tomorrow morning, with the wind of a new administration's anti-Cylon, pro-godliness policies at their back…

His arm tightened around his wife as he saw the picketers who'd gathered at the entrance of the commons hall. Karl Agathon, a deeply grim expression on his usually affable face, was cuffing a man. The man in handcuffs, for his part, was screaming invectives at Lee Adama as the president entered to vote. The picketer's companion was holding a sign with the president's face on it. "'Apollo'," the sign read, the callsign in derisive quotation marks. Underneath it, in bright red letters, there was one word.

_Heretic_.

A God, the gods… it hardly mattered, as far as Baltar was concerned, whether this particular picketer thought that Lee's callsign amounted to taking the name of the god Apollo in vain, or whether he thought all the lords of Kobol were false idols standing in the way of the One True God that Gaius had come, despite himself, to see as a fact of the universe.

Lee's candidacy was doomed, as Gaius had tried to warn him, by his own apostasy. By the fact that he didn't seem to believe in any god whatsoever, only real life, fallible human beings. "Heretic" was just a shorthand for it.

* * *

><p>"How many?" Saul was asking grimly. The Chief was standing next to the Tigh's dining room table, having declined a seat.<p>

"Enough to arm a full militia of around eight hundred heads." The Chief's relationship with the military had never been an easy one—much less since arriving here on Earth—but his posture screamed his history, just now, perhaps more than it ever had when he'd actually been with the service. "It's worse than that, though. The _Hitei Kan_ and the _Greenleaf _jumped back into orbit forty minutes ago."

Saul grunted. The two rogue ships that had fled when Lee had commandeered the fleet's tylium supply, months ago, had made two appearances since, jumping into range and then back out before they could be seized each time. The issue—that an eighth of the fleet's tylium supply had remained out of Lee's control, and that he'd ordered the unpopular seizure in the first place—had dogged his whole campaign.

"Any sign of expected attack?"

"They're not responding to wireless."

"What's the military command's probability analysis say?"

"I'm not sure they have one, sir. Helo's on election patrol, and Hoshi's… inexperienced." And not strategically minded, though the Chief didn't say it. "Sir." Chief heard himself deferring to the Colonel's old rank, and it felt right. "I think someone needs to make sure we're preparing for the possibility of civil war."

Saul nodded, briskly, and surged to his feet. Now their postures were identical. "I'm headed to the CIC. Find the admiral."

* * *

><p>"Kara. I appreciate the thought. But I don't have time for a pleasure hike, just now. It's election day. There was a major weapons theft last night. There've already been six cases of voter fraud and forty arrests on disorderly behavior at the polls…"<p>

"Hmm, and what will your presence here all afternoon change about any of that?"

"I'm actually the sitting president, as it turns out—"

"Who has a massive staff whose job it is to take care of incidental problems. But what could really happen before the polls close at 17 hundred hours? We won't even have results until two hours after that, minimum! C'mon." Blue and hazel gazes tangled in the air between them. "This is the time we have, Lee. This is it."

He hesitated. She saw it, gritted her teeth.

He didn't want to listen to her carefully prepared goodbye speech. He'd been avoiding conversation with her for days, because of it. Last night, she'd let herself be distracted by a hard, exhausting frak on their kitchen table, and this morning, he'd crawled out of bed before she was awake. Now… zero hour, it seemed. If he went with her, he would hear all the things his brain had been resolutely holding at bay.

He'd given over to what he knew was a brand of magical thinking: he half-believed that if he didn't go, didn't hear her goodbyes, then what she felt coming might not happen.

Magical thinking. He knew it was a coward's position, but part of him thought the easiest thing would be if she just, poof, disappeared, all at once. No goodbyes would mean no pain.

Frak. Just thinking it made him see the error. Why did they call it magical when they meant _crazy_?

"I'm having dinner in a little while with my father," he parried, hoping she could be waved off again. "He says he has some questions about Conoy and the Arrow…"

"It can wait, Lee." _It's my last day on Earth, Lee. I can't wait, Lee_.

He heard her, and though his whole chest compressed against it, the unspoken words slipped inside and took furious root. And so he just looked at her a long while, angry and afraid, like the moment before he'd left her apartment on the night they first met, like the day she finally told him she wouldn't leave Zak for him, like he'd looked at her across Zak's casket, like…

She shivered, and he relented.

"Fine. Let's go. But I don't want any touching goodbye scene."

"OK."

"And no final confessions, either. If you frakked someone else all over my desk last week, I don't wanna hear about it today."

"OK."

"And if even one godsdamned platitude about how you're 'already dead' or how, actually, my life will be easier once you're… if you go. If one of those even crosses your _mind—_"

"No trite bullshit. Got it."

"OK." He let out a breath. "Let me just tell my staff I'm running off with you." He paused a few steps away, turned back to her. "You didn't actually frak someone else last week—"

She laughed, but even now—especially now—that wounded her in her most-wounded place. _Like he looked after I frakked Baltar. Like he looked when I came back from Caprica with the Arrow. Like he looked the morning I married Sam…_ "You know, I'm not s'posed to say, Apollo."

"Right." He heard her call him by his callsign, heard the cooling distance it implied, winced at what he'd accused her of and then realized that he still wasn't sure he hadn't been right to ask. "Great."

"_Go_, Lee."

He went. And against all odds, it would be the last time he left her voluntarily.

* * *

><p>When Bill Adama finally came across Sarah Porter, an hour before the polls were to close, she was sitting by herself in the chapel on Colonial One. Her campaign had commandeered the ship as symbolic headquarters. In it, she was praying.<p>

"To which god, Sarah?" Bill asked softly, sliding onto a pew across from where she knelt.

She smiled gracefully. "To Apollo, to ask him for a successful contest, today. Ironic, I suppose." She watched him carefully, but spoke as if simply making conversation. "Do you know the Taurons associate him with the moon? Odd, given that most of us think of the sun—"

"Why the alliance with Conoy, Sarah? He doesn't believe in anything you do, you must know that."

"I wondered when you would finally come and ask me. You, or your son." Her smile was gentle, now. "It's simple, Bill. The end of the Scrolls of Pythia. 'And in the days after the miracle, the children of the gods shall reunite with their own lost children, and together the people of the gods shall rule again.' I knew I needed to make a lasting alliance with the followers of the Cylon's one God—blasphemous, of course, but nearer to us than…" Realizing who she was talking to, she looked away uncomfortably.

"Then us skeptics." Bill was frowning, not only because he thought her interpretation of that verse was a bit self-congratulatory—that was to be expected—but because his dim memories of hearing the scrolls read, many years ago at services with his mother, pricked at him. "There's another part, after that, though. The scrolls end… strangely."

"Strangely, yes. Also beautifully. 'And the whole world shall dissolve with the cry of the horn. So launch, children of the gods, the impossible return, before the angels blaze to their lasting heaven. That which you have abandoned, carry with you. Those who are undiscovered, enfold them in your arms and bring them home. Step, at last, through the doorway of the years, and find there the slow, partial peace of those whose hearts are fire and who have sacrificed that fire for the cause of life.' " She cleared her throat. "It moves you every time, doesn't it? Since we got to Earth, I feel as if I'm hearing it for the first time."

"I know what you mean." He let the words marinate in his brain, because he _did _know what she meant. The old claptrap seemed, suddenly, as if it might mean something.

But he'd come here with another purpose. Deliberately, almost gently, Bill drew a sidearm from where it had been tucked beneath his suit coat at his side and pointed it at her levelly.

"I'm afraid I can't let you leave here, Sarah, until the _Hitei Kan _and the _Greenleaf_ are back under colonial control, and the weapons stolen last night have been recovered by the military. Or until I can trust your orders won't lead to mass bloodshed."

Her throat seemed to close over, if her hard swallowing was any judge. "Under whose authority? You're not the fleet commander anymore, Bill."

"I'm afraid you're mistaken. I was reinstated an hour ago. Just after Major Hoshi determined the colony is at threat level alpha for civil war."

"My staff… They're waiting for me…"

"If you were able to go outside, you'd find that the control room says this room is dark, and that they believe you've gone to hold services at the temple."

"Bill, this is _madness_. You must know it is."

"I think," the commander said reflectively, "that I'd prefer it if you called me Admiral Adama. For the time being."

* * *

><p>There were hours, days, maybe years, in which Samuel Anders worked contentedly on the projects to which he'd been assigned: maintain all systems, diagnose viruses, repair, start up, shut down, repeat. His life as a hybrid passed like a dream he was having as if from the point of view of another organism, one who saw in different colors, colors which streamed across his vision more mesmerizingly than the galaxy out of Galactica's observation deck. An organism with new capacities for seeing patterns, for <em>knowing<em>….

But whatever Sam had known, lying in his hybrid bath for months, receded swiftly the second that he woke up.

"…a war, and I'm afraid we're going to need your aid. Ah, there, you are." Gaius Baltar briskly rubbed a cotton ball dipped in iodine over the place where he'd just injected Sam with his last available milliliters of his unborn son's blood, and plastered a bandage on top.

"What the… where the hell am I?" Sam demanded. Was he in some kind of tomb? A temple? Was he on the surface of a _planet_? In a hybrid bath? He'd become a hybrid?

His head was suddenly aching, felt like it had been in a pressurized vise for hours. A wave of blackness hit his vision, and nausea followed hard in its wake.

Baltar was peering back over his own shoulder worriedly, and whatever he saw there, through the pillars, put a light of fear in his eyes when he turned back to Anders.

"Listen carefully. There's no time to explain. But Leoben Conoy is coming this way, and if you have any sense of self-preservation, I suggest you _play hybrid_. Now."

Though Sam knew better than to trust Gaius Baltar's word, he trusted fear a great deal, and it was almost oozing from the man's pores. And he trusted Leoben Conoy less than about anything.

Conoy. The dream he'd just been having was receding too fast to catch more than the tiniest final tendrils of it, but there was something there…

_Oh, gods_. His eyes bulged, and the nausea grew worse. But he laid back in the bath, rested his aching head, and attempted a hybrid imitation, coding all the panic that was rushing to his aching brain.

"Set… set anterior timer. Prepare mobile care units. Prepare mobile deflection units."

He could hear the sound of stone scraping against stone, edging closer.

"End of line."


	14. Magical Thinking, Part 2

_**A/N: This is a huge chapter, in terms of both emotional investment and story content. I thought I could get "Magical Thinking" done in two parts, but when Part 2 (posted below) became 10,000 words long, I realized it was rightfully several chapters. So what has now become the *next* chapter is already mostly written and will follow within the next few days, to close Act I with a bang.**_

_**The chapter's edited to retain a "T" rating on ; for the "M" version, feel free to visit my livejournal under the same username. (If you're, you know, a grown-up of some kind or other.)**_

**Previously: **_Sarah Porter and Leoben Conoy campaigned against Lee Adama on a platform of "Cylon humanization" (demanding that all Cylons' shared memories be deleted and that they live as individuals), which fomented the ongoing unrest between Cylons and humans.  
><em>

_Lee's policy of centralizing control of the colony's remaining tylium supplies led two ships, the Greenleaf and the Hitei Kan, to flee the system with an eighth of the fleet's reserves._

_Bill Adama held Sarah Porter hostage as the election began, demanding that she renounce humanization and theocracy, and negotiate the peaceful return of the rogue ships._

_Kara Thrace believed that her destiny would be completed when she finished building a Temple of Unity, and she moved Sam Anders into it, to control the grid as the settlement's hybrid._

_And Gaius Baltar's half-Cylon son's blood was used to revive Sam from his hybrid coma, in the temple's central chamber._

_Complicated enough? It's about to get simpler._

* * *

><p>By seventeen hundred hours, when the polls closed, military forces loyal to the Adamas had secured <em>Galactica<em> and fired up its weapons systems. The standoff was official.

Around eighteen hundred hours, her staff had finally noticed Sarah Porter was missing. They immediately assumed she'd been kidnapped and began a full-scale search of her rivals' offices and quarters. During a panicked staff meeting, her vice-presidential running mate, Leoben Conoy, suggested she'd been assassinated under military orders.

By nineteen hundred hours, the final results were tallied. Lee Adama had been defeated by 1,148 votes. Sarah Porter was the new colonial president, needing only Adama's concession to formalize it before a swearing-in (if only anyone could find either of them).

At nineteen-thirty, the Sixes, in conjunction with most of the Eights, a handful of wary Twos, and Ellen Tigh, announced the outcome of their own private election: they intended to secede and form a separate Cylon government, and formally rejected Cylon humanization. The resisters were rapidly enclosed by an ad hoc human militia, armed with weapons stolen out of _Galactica'_s off-site arms locker the night before.

In _Galactica_'s CIC, debates as to whether the military should intervene in this second standoff raged as Karl Agathon's patience grew thinner.

At nineteen-forty-five, calls for Lee Adama's formal concession grew violent when a mob gathered around _Galactica_ and rained on it with bullets and epithets. It was then that Gaius Baltar threw a dark robe over his wife and began a swift journey up the mountainside to Admiral Adama's empty cabin. He claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that he'd hide with her under the floorboards if necessary. There was nowhere else left to hide, that either could name.

At around the same time, Bill Adama asked Sarah Porter, whom he'd handcuffed to the lectern in the Colonial One chapel, to renounce Cylon humanization in order to restore peace. She refused again. He began to doubt the wisdom of his intervention.

Fifteen minutes after that, the war claimed a first casualty. When a party including two former ship captains, Sarah Porter's chief of staff, and a Two and an Eight attempted to board _Galactica_ to negotiate a peace settlement, a member of the crowd pulled out a shotgun and drilled a shell into the Eight's brain. "Humanization or you're all monsters!" the gunwoman yelled.

And after that, chaos reigned.

* * *

><p>As they trudged up into the hills on a path that Lee was surprised to see was already well-worn, they were mostly silent. Kara tried to rile him about how out-of-shape civilian life was making him, though it wasn't, and about how finicky he was about being out in nature, though she was more annoyed by the twilight insects than he was.<p>

But it was, she was fairly confident, the last night of her life, and so she wasn't really in the mood. His grunted responses said he wasn't, either. His pace was brisk, as if he were running late for a meeting.

Kara, however, felt calm. She knew this feeling from before; she was no longer afraid to set herself on fire. She knew how to behave at her own funeral.

"There it is," she murmured, as they rounded a corner and came into sight of what she'd wanted to show him.

She tried to remember the last time she'd given someone a gift, of any kind. She hated giving them. They always seemed to mean too much, or not enough. And Lee… she'd never gotten anything right, that she'd tried to give him. But maybe this time.

Just now, he didn't say anything, although she was very sure he saw it. He tensed—more, if it were possible—and something hard and bright came into his eyes.

One thing about Lee. She'd been watching him for years, and she still couldn't tell terror from hope.

When they finally stopped in front of her gift, he stood there for a long while, measuring its dimensions with his eyes: two stories, with a peaked roof over a third floor attic. Hatch-style bracings visible on the outside, so its strength was apparent; alcoved windows with perfect symmetry aside from a recessed porch and a stray third floor window, so its beauty grew the longer you looked. But if there were metaphors here, they were accidents and no design. The design had been centered only around the idea that this building should last.

"What the hell is this?" he asked, low and urgent—low because he was angry, urgent because he already knew.

She steeled herself. "I built you a house."

That hard, bright glint again. "You built me a house."

"Yeah."

"You built me a frakking _house_."

"Having trouble with words, today, tiger?"

"_Frak_. How's that for a word?" He spun away from her and kicked so a clod of rock and dirt when flying. "What were you _thinking_, Kara?"

She blinked back her tears rapidly, before he could spin back and see them. "I was thinking that I wanted you to have a place to live. That wasn't a tent."

He didn't look at her, couldn't trust himself. "Unbelievable. Un-_frakking_-believable!"

"I take it you don't want a tour."

"Oh, by all means. Give me a tour to the house that you built to salve your godsdamned conscience."

Kara pressed her lips together hard. "That's not what I was doing."

"I get it. A nice little hat tip. The quote-unquote-real version of that invisible frakking house where you told me—" He cut himself off, swore again. "My consolation prize is a godsdamned suburban dream home all to myself. Well. Thanks, but no thanks."

He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned back down the path they'd come up.

"Wait! That's not what I meant! Lee. Calm the frak down!"

He spun back to her, grabbed for her. "Then what the hell _did_ you mean, Kara? Can you say it? For once, can you _frakking say it_? Can I hear what you're thinking one godsdamned time in your entire frakked-up life?" He was yelling, shaking her shoulders, and she was scared, and hurt, and hurt for him, and so she couldn't stop the tears, this time.

"I wanted to have a part of your life!" The words burst through her lips, and busted open a dam with them. "Just one. I have to leave you, and every other damn person on the planet gets more of your life, more minutes, more meals, more meetings, more…" She gritted her teeth. "I have to leave you with Hylene Fauvre, who you'll probably have an army of rugrats with, and every Six in the universe will have her eyes all over you for the next godsdamned half century, and Helo and Hoshi and the Chief, who you'll sit around and drink beers with and tell stories and… and _laugh _with …" Her voice finally caught.

Lee cocked his head to the side. "Kids with Captain Fauvre? Kara, you know that's insane, right?"

"I just wanted to give you something—for once. To build something. Instead of destroying, ruining. I wanted to _make_ something, for you. So you could… remember me. Sometimes. Happily, I mean." She wiped an angry sleeve across her face.

"So I could remember you. Sometimes. Happily?" Lee breathed.

"Really are having trouble with the words, today, Apollo. Good thing it didn't happen at the debates or—"

"Shut up." And then he kissed her, not hungrily, not tenderly, just lips on lips, the kissing version of triage.

"I just wanted to be here," she whispered against his mouth. "Just, you know, in a _way_—"

He crushed her back against him, lips and nose pressed into hers so hard he was almost breathing for her. "Seriously, shut up."

When he let her go, it wasn't very far. He pulled back a few inches from her face. "Let me spell out the problem here, for you, now that I can see you don't get it."

"I just need you to understand that this wasn't about my _ego_, Lee." He ignored her.

"You're leaving. Forever. Nothing can make up for that. There's nothing you could say or do. So this house… Every beam, every window, every frakking door knob is actively, relentlessly you_, _leaving. Again and again, every time I look at it for the rest of my life, leaving—leaving only a godsdamned house with a bunch of godsdamned door knobs. And leaving me with 'em."

She waited a long beat. "You know, I haven't actually gotten all the door knobs installed just yet." She was covering up how hard her heart was racing with a kind of wild… was that _joy_? It couldn't be, not tonight of all nights.

He shot her a look. "Insult to injury, Kara." He scowled. "The real kicker is that you think it might make me _happy_." His own eyes were bright, but his thumb was brushing away the tears she hadn't realized were still falling down her face. He nodded at the house. "It looks beautiful, sweetheart. For a torture chamber."

Now she was grinning on top of it all. Gods, this woman. Like sunlight glittering through raindrops, all sparkle and incongruity. And she did it to him, too; he'd been furious thirty seconds ago, and now he wanted to laugh. "And here I thought you might be into that stuff," she murmured. "You know, just another one of your little kinks."

"And you think I might have a problem _remembering_ you. Like I'm going to be getting one of those beers you mentioned with Galen in twenty years, and I'll find myself saying, 'oh, yeah, that was back when what's-her-name was around, you remember—blonde, feisty, never met a bad idea she didn't like…"

"C'mon. Man up, Apollo. Let me show it to you. Just so you can… know?"

She bit her lip, afraid that he'd ask what he would know. Afraid, because the answer still hurt too much to say aloud.

_I want you to know what I wanted my life to be like._

He sighed. "Yet another bad idea." He hung his head for a moment, she thought she heard him say a word—_torture_—and when he lifted his head, there were those eyes, again, at their lightest blue because of the depth of the darkness inside him, light because he accepted it.

Gods. She couldn't bear it.

"Alright. Show me our house, then."

* * *

><p>Sam had no idea how successful his hybrid pretense had been, for the unfortunate reason that he'd lost consciousness four times in the same number of hours, since Baltar had awakened him. Intermittent seizing, pounding headache, crippling nausea—they weren't, he knew, in the hybrid job description.<p>

A few minutes before, a group of Twos speaking with the accent of Gemenon had finished the statue installation above his head. Until they'd left, he hadn't dared let himself look at it. He'd looked, now, and had had a hard time maintaining any kind of composure.

In limestone, a fifteen-foot tall Kara Thrace loomed behind him. She had a fine replica of the Arrow of Apollo in her hands, and Earth at her feet, her hair ringed by a guttered crown, like Artemis's except that it was spouting an eternal flame. Her shoulders were thrown back and her eyes resolutely forward, in a composite posture of righteousness.

He knew she must be dead if they'd made a statue. No one would blaspheme so visibly, and in permanent, indelible _stone_. But it was also the case, he realized, that, hybrids' voices didn't break. So he held his peace, and his tears, as he attempted to hold onto consciousness.

He had to get to _Galactica_. Sorting through the electrical grid files he was plugged into, he'd discovered that some idiot-genius had burrowed a tunnel under the temple and into the battlestar. It was encrypted, _and_ defended by _Galactica_'s own system at the other end. A frakking secret tunnel under a temple, of all things.

This holy place had been built with contingencies for battle. And no one was supposed to know.

He doubted he could make it through the tunnel himself; he felt instinctively that unplugging the wires connecting him to the bath would probably kill him. He just needed someone, anyone he could trust, to come along. Swiftly. But most of the people he'd trusted were dead. _Oh, God. May your gods bless and keep you, Kara. _"C'mon. Saul. Galen. Apollo. I'd take Laura frakking Roslin at this point," he muttered. Sam squeezed his eyes shut and began, again, to catalogue the dangers that the hybrid dream had revealed to him.

"President Roslin's no longer with us." Leoben Conoy stepped quietly out of the shadows of the columns by Sam's right hand. "But it's nice to see that you are, sir."

Sam was almost relieved that someone was finally here, even if it were the last person he'd wanted to see. "Leoben." His vision went black for a moment. "You're frakked, Conoy. I know your game." He was angry, but Leoben looked so much like Sam's brother, Ben, after whom he'd been modeled, that Sam's voice softened as he looked at him. God, to remember—it was so strange that he'd ever forgotten. "It's a young man's game. You can't go back, Horn or no Horn. You can't save him. You can't save any of those people."

"You're wrong, sir. They're alive. And Daniel's with them. Kara can find them—she's the only person alive who's been there. And the Horn can take us back."

Sam scoffed. The same pie-in-the-sky idealism his brother had been born with. "We're _all_ murderers, Leoben. You have to find a way to live with the mistake you made. It's destroying you. It's going to destroy everyone."

"Wrong. On this world, I've been an agent of chaos, snipping pieces of the pattern out, rearranging others. But it's only to fix the pattern, sir. You know I've only ever wanted to fix it." He nodded at Kara's statue, over Sam's head. "Those flames around her head… it's exactly how I see her. It's how we all saw her, when her parents brought her in. An angel—you were the one who said it, sir, remember? An angel aglow with the light of God."

The nausea was stronger, now. "That wasn't what I meant. She was a _child_."

"It doesn't matter, not anymore. _That_ past is over and done with, and thank God for it." Leoben set himself down on the edge of Sam's tub, reached into the water almost casually to jerk a wire out of Sam's shoulder and force it into his own palm. "Where's the Horn, sir?"

"You won't find out that way."

"But I know it's here somewhere. Everything points to it…" He sighed, as the information from the electrical grid siphoned into his brain and was unencrypted. "Of course she built a tunnel out of this temple. Good God! I would have been shocked if she'd done anything else."

When Sam's brother had laughed, several thousand years ago on another Earth, it hadn't had that mineral sound, like a coin clinking on a stone cup.

"_Kara_ built this place?"

"I forgot how deeply asleep you were, sir. But yes, this is Kara Thrace's Temple of Unity, here on New Earth. I'm sure she'll be along shortly. Can't imagine what's keeping her." He slid the wire stem back into Sam's shoulder. "I'll be ready with the Horn by then." As he scuttled behind the statue to open the hatchway to the tunnel, he called one last thing over his shoulder. "If I don't see you again, thank you for my life, doctor. I'll do you and your brother proud."

And then Sam lost consciousness again, and the camp's power flickered out with him.

* * *

><p>Kara showed him the study, the storage closets, the root cellar. In the kitchen, she'd shown him how to pump water from the well the Chief had personally installed with the aid of the dozens of Centurions and military vets she'd commissioned for the project. They'd both drunk from the top gun stein that had reverted to Kara when she'd found Earth, and which she ceremoniously passed to Lee, tonight. It was funny how quickly it had come to seem quaint.<p>

Now, they were making their way into the upstairs hallway, and Lee was continuing to critique her design choices.

"C'mon. How many lookouts does one house need?"

"This one just has three. One with a direct eyeline to _Galactica_." She squinted through it now, noticed that there seemed to be some bonfires down around it in the camp. She supposed they must be celebrating, and looking for Lee, one way or the other. But they'd have to wait. "One toward your father's cabin. I know, I know—but he's not getting any younger, Lee, and at least this way you can see if his house goes dark, or gods forbid catches fire…"

He rolled his eyes. "So I can what, shout at him about it? Maybe we can run a string between the houses for Tauron telephone?"

"The third's not really a lookout, just a skylight shaped like one." She pulled him into the largest room on the floor, the master bedroom, though it was empty of furniture. "See? It's where the moon was, the night we were putting in the roof."

"So it'll show me the moon once every few… _Frak!_ Gods, we have to get back to camp. Did you see that?"

Lee was halfway out the door. "What? I was looking where you were, Apollo—"

"You didn't see that Raider go flying across the sky?" He was incredulous.

"Apollo." She got his attention. "Be serious. The only Raiders left are friendly. And if they weren't, you know as well as I do that _Galactica_'s detection systems would have gone off long before it got close enough that we could _see_ it. Battlestar klaxons are audible at what, 8 miles? Not to mention the signal flares…"

"You're right." He stepped out onto the balcony, stared at the sky, anyway. "I know you're right, but holy gods, I haven't felt that jolt in… too long."

She took that last admission in stride. They all missed the war. "Take it from someone who's seen a phantom Raider or two in her day… let it go."

He leaned against the balcony railing and rubbed his hands over his face, hard. Her heart jolted because he suddenly looked so much like she'd imagined him, there. Glad she'd had the foresight to stock some beers for just this moment, she rifled them out of the hall closet and opened one for each of them.

"Is that what you would do, Kara? If you could go back to that moment?"

"Let that Raider go?" She thought a moment, took a long swig. "Nah… even with hindsight, I guess I couldn't, right? I don't know how I remembered the song—if it came out of all that—but I do know that it, you know, that it happened for a reason."

Lee clenched his jaw, and for once it gave her no satisfaction to have made him mad. "You, of all people, believe that?"

"C'mon, Apollo. I know they call you a heretic in the camp, but I thought I'd made a believer out of you."

"The gods? Sure. Can't argue with a higher power anymore." He swallowed his beer harder than he had to. "But given that they're out there, I have a hard time believing that they couldn't come up with a better way."

"Aww, thanks, sir, your vote of confidence—"

"No, I mean, not a better way _than_ you, a better way _for_ you. 'Cause, you know, _we_ got Earth. You just got screwed."

"'Gods' design, means it's fine.' And given that it's my last night on Earth, I'd _love_ to get screwed." She raised suggestive eyebrows at him, because she definitely didn't want compassion, tonight. "Whaddaya say to one last one for the road, Lee?"

That broke the pity party up. He threw his head back and laughed. "Gods, I'm going to miss your sense of romance." His grin faded slowly, at that. "I'm going to miss you. So damned—"

"Outside?" she asked brightly. "I haven't shown you the yard yet." And she couldn't bring herself to jump him here, in the master bedroom, because of a pathetic corner of her soul that wanted it too hard. It would feel too much like stealing from his future. Haunting his house. _No more taking, Kara. Or—not too much._

He pushed away from the railing, let his eyes trace over her as she walked out of the bedroom in front of him, memorized her there. And let himself be led outside.

* * *

><p>"…the number of unknown variables alone makes it prohibitive," Saul was saying, his knuckles white as he pressed his fingers down on the glass table at the center of the CIC. Helo had had enough.<p>

"C'mon, Colonel. Starbuck, Apollo, Sarah Porter, and the Admiral are all MIA. There are eighteen structures in the camp that are currently on fire. The power is going on and off like fireworks. And meanwhile, our only sure allies outside this ship, the Sixes and Eights, are holding ground against armed extremists who have already opened fire on colonial citizens in the name of Sarah Porter and 'humanization.'"

"Sarah Porter is the democratically elected president. I repeat, I'm not sure we have the authority to side against her."

"She put people's lives up to a frakking vote. That makes the 'will of the people' beside the point."

"Not to the people outside, it doesn't."

"We don't have time to debate this, sir. With every minute that we sit on our hands, all the Sixes and Eights—who, I repeat, are colonial citizens—are in danger of being gunned down by a mob. We _have _to send aid."

"I'm still waiting for your plan, Helo."

"We send out a small squadron. Me, maybe five others. The squadron notifies the Cylon resisters to retreat to the temple—high ground, it's defendable. And _Galactica_ sends a team of Raptors with Viper escorts to pick 'em up and bring 'em home."

"And then, what, we're _all _holed up in here? That's not a strategy, that's suicide."

"Well, it's a step up from mass murder, Colonel."

Saul's one eye seemed not to blink in the minute after he gave the go-ahead.


	15. No Time

_Disclaimer: Not my house, I'm a (legal!) squatter._

_A/N: Buckle up, K/L fans, shit's about to get crazy real._

* * *

><p>It was criminal, Kara thought, how few times she'd gotten to see Lee naked in the moonlight in her life. His skin picked up a gleam that reminded her of launch tube lights on the nose of her Viper. And his eyes… maybe everyone's eyes became infinite and impenetrable in the moonlight. But she'd never noticed it in anyone but Lee. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd trained herself to notice.<p>

If Lee had been planning this night—no, she didn't want to think about that. Well, but it was only that he would have thought of things like food, and blankets. And they'd probably be inside the house, which would probably have furniture in it. Although, if he'd been the one doing the planning, he would have built said house with floor-to-ceiling windows, a giant fireplace and a back and side door, and a dozen other features that would've made it impossible to defend. She was really going to have to be the one to remember that the world was still…

The sharp pain ripping across her chest cut off that line of thought and she clenched her teeth to avoid letting it escape her lips.

"What's this tree?" Lee was leaning up against it, and it probably wasn't comfortable against his bare back, but he wasn't complaining. Kara was sprawled over his legs and began to busy herself by tracing her fingers over the muscles of his shoulders. It crossed her mind that she should have painted him. Naked, under a fruit tree? Gods, he'd hate it. He'd at least pretend to. She wished she'd thought of it a few months ago.

"A pear. That's what they're calling it, 'cause of the shape of the fruit." Kara adjusted his arms more tightly around her, because—she told herself this was why—she wasn't freezing, but she wasn't exactly warm. "Prob'ly blooms a couple times a year."

"Hmm." They were silent for a long while before he spoke again. "You know, I'd been saving up to buy a house, eventually. Somewhere in what's left of C City, there's a piece of paper that says I'm doing pretty well, for a military man."

"Let me guess, half of every paycheck?"

"More like sixty percent."

She bit her lip to stifle a laugh, unsurprised. She could just see Lee, sensibly foregoing pleasure after pleasure—off-planet vacations, steak dinners, new cars and new gadgets—for a future that had never come. Who knew? If it had come, she might have lived to envy him his foresight. "Guess you learned your lesson."

He let out a long, easy sigh. "Guess so."

Kara considered what he was saying. "Oh my gods, Lee. Were you, just now, trying to tell me that you have… good prospects?"

He smiled against the hair spilling down the back of her neck. "Had. Unfortunately, they're worse all the time."

Kara bit his shoulder, now. She didn't notice that she was happy, or that being happy immediately made her feel guilty—she just felt the guilt. "Oh, right. Should you be… getting back? They probably have election results now."

"Screw the election," he said, a touch pained that she was so ready to leave this place. But then he added much more gently: "There'll be others."

"You think you lost?"

"I know it."

"So what are you gonna do now?"

He leaned his head back against the tree again, giving a stock answer to avoid thinking about what he hadn't ever let himself think about. "Whatever I can to help the most people."

"You'll like that… you get off on that stuff."

"Mmm, you're in a good position to tell me what I get off on."

She grinned, considering pulling him back down on top of her, couldn't have said why she didn't. "Being right. You really like being right."

Lee tensed, very slightly, which was when she noticed how utterly relaxed he'd been until then. "Who doesn't?"

She shrugged. "I'm not an addict."

"No kidding."

She grabbed the drop cloth that had been serving as their picnic blanket and pulled a side of it up around herself, little realizing how tellingly defensive the gesture was, just as little as he realized how casually he could wound her. Still, she kept her tone light. Mostly light. "You're shooting clay pigeons here, Apollo. Name _one_ time when you've been indisputably right and I've been indisputably wrong."

"Well, let's see. How long do you think you have left on Earth, again?"

"Date, place, and evidence, or it didn't happen."

An expression came to his face that she knew well and wished she'd seen more often. _I'm about to do something reckless_, it screamed. _I need a moment to carefully prepare for my recklessness._

"11th Aprilis, must have been… eight years ago. Bright & Sharpe Tavern, Delphi."

She choked on a gasp. She never gasped. "_Don't._"

"I asked you to leave my brother. One last time."

Her distress became a snarl as easily as breathing. "Oh, yeah, good example. You were definitely in the right, that afternoon, 'cause you were the beacon of morality who was frakking his brother's girlfriend."

He shrugged. "How high the high ground is depends on where the low ground is. You asked for evidence of a time when you were indisputably wrong. Remember your answer?"

She was on her feet now, the gleam of combat in her eye, and he was there beside her in an instant.

"You said, and I quote, 'Zak needs me.'" Her blood froze. He reached down to pull on his boxers, then his dress trousers. "Need more _evidence_?"

He crossed behind her to grab his shirt, and tossed her hers. Above him, there was that house she'd built him, sturdy and non-judgmental. She kept her eyes on it as she pulled her shirt on over her head, foregoing her bra, wherever it was.

"He did need me."

"About as much as a Centurion needs a bubble bath, sweetheart."

"He was lost. I don't think you got just how insecure he was." Lee rolled his eyes. "He was such an extrovert—he hid it all, you know, with a joke—"

"Or a drink. Or ten."

"He drank, yeah. Just like you, but for different reasons. He drank to forget how much he didn't want the life your dad mapped out for him. But you… you drank to forget how much you did. 'Cause you hated how much you loved being a frakking warrior." She shook her head. "It looked the same on the outside, I gotta say."

She was pulling on her own clothes, now.

"I loved Zak. But I was _not _like him."

Kara snorted. "How do you figure? Because you thought your dad was the problem, and he thought you were?"

They stood tense, a few feet from each other, between the house and the pear tree. It was another boxing ring. Neither of them let the other out of their sights for even a moment. Lee's fists even clenched, by his sides.

"This is easy for you, isn't it? For you, there's no tomorrow. You'll be gone when the clock strikes midnight or a frakking cloud passes over the moon. I'm staring four or five decades of not knowing what the hell happened to my life." He swallowed. "That's if I make it."

"What do you want me to say?"

He didn't—for once—hesitate. "What do you think? I want to know if you ever meant it. Any of it."

A feeling shook her now, like the dull thud of metal hitting thick rubber at high speed. It reverberated powerfully, but didn't make a sound. The impact of Lee's bottomless doubt as it lashed out at her always felt just that way.

And on this last night of everything, it made her frakking furious.

"Listen. I know it goes against every story you tell yourself. But one of these days you gotta own up—_you're_ the one who never meant it." She held up a hand to cut him off as she tilted her head back at the sky, found a constellation they had seen with the help of the Arrow of Apollo, on Kobol, and everyone knew now as Capricorn. Gods, Delphi was so much farther away than that, in real terms. If they could travel at only light speed, it would take them years to get back there. "You know what you said to _me_, when I said Zak needed me?"

"I don't remember." His tone tried to say that he couldn't care less.

"That's 'cause you said nothin'. Nothin', Lee. No arguments, no proclamations that _you_ needed me, or even wanted me…"

He went still.

"No taking matters into your own hands and telling Zak yourself that we'd had an affair, which I kept thinking—dreading—frak, _hoping_, you'd do. You didn't even get mad, not in front of me, anyway. You went cold, and you walked away."

"I told you I _needed_ you—frak, Kara, I can't help it if you weren't listening."

"You mean a thousand years later, on New Caprica? You didn't say that. _No_. You didn't! You got drunk and you started howling in the moonlight. And when I asked if you were sure—about me—do you know what you said to me?"

"I said _yes_." His teeth were clenched.

"You said, oh, Kara, I didn't even know I loved you until ten seconds ago, I've been hiding it from myself, I really don't want to need you and I kinda wish I didn't have these feelings, but you know what, I guess I do. Dither. Hesitate. _Howl_. Not exactly your most inspiring speech, hotshot."

She shivered, feeling again the clear and certain uncertainty that had been emanating from him in waves that night. Who could have trusted that level of wildness from anyone, let alone from steady Lee Adama?

Kara didn't trust anyone at all. And she'd trusted Lee much less after that night than she had before it.

He leaned back on the corner of the porch. "It terrified you. I could tell you were terrified, but frak, you were _always_ terrified." He shoved those fists, still clenched, into his pockets, hid them away. "You didn't believe I meant it… when I said I loved you?"

"I knew you didn't mean it. You couldn't. Even if you did…" She shook her head impatiently, and when she spoke again, it was like she was laying out one of her insane stratagems in the CIC. "If you didn't mean it—and you _didn't_—I had to get away to save you from _me_, because I would have used you up, Lee, just clung on like a leech and never let go."

His eyes were closed, and he didn't open them, now. "And if I did mean it?"

"Then you'd lost your mind. And I had to save you from yourself."

He almost fell forward at that, threw an arm across his stomach for a moment. He couldn't want to throw up any more than she did. "I should have known." She could barely hear him. "I thought you did it to save yourself. From having to finally give a frak whether you lived or died. But you married Sam to save _me_."

She shrugged. Column A and Column B were hard to distinguish, for her. "Don't forget that I was there when you married Dee. You were pretty frakking relieved."

"Relieved! Kara, you are so frakking insane, the only wonder is that it took you 29 years to fly into a storm and blow yourself up! _Save _me! You wanted to _save_ me, so you married Sam, who you also had to frakking save…" He bit out a laugh. "You want to talk about addictions. Get your heroism habit checked out."

"I don't have a 'heroism habit.'"

"Zak, Laura, Sam… every nugget you've ever flown with... I mean, you left the godsdamned human race to save it, Kara."

"_You_ left me, sugar. You left me in Delphi, with Zak. You left me on New Caprica—"

"Does it matter that you were marrying someone else on both occasions?"

"You left me for Dee—a hundred times over. You left me in that—"

"Don't say it." His sorest spot, and though she'd never touched it or even seen it, she knew it.

"In that maelstrom. You _let me go_."

"Your plane _exploded. _Right in front of me, Kara. And I almost flew right into it, right with you, anyway."

She sighed. "Yeah, actually, that's not what I meant." Her head was shaking, and suddenly all the rage was gone and she was just sad, for both of them, again. "Look, let's just… let's not do this tonight. I'm at peace, now. I've accepted it. We did the best we could with impossible circumstances. You can't win 'em all."

"Frak that." Lee, on the other hand, was still in the grip of his grievances.

"What good do you s'pose regrets are_ now_?"

"Yeah, well, what good are lies? You want me to believe that all the stolen time, the cheating, lying to Zak, the old man, to Dee and Sam—that we couldn't have done any frakking better than _that_?" He set his jaw. "No. I could have looked my brother—all of them—in the eye and told him the truth. So could you. It wasn't impossible. It was just _harder_."

"Fine. But we didn't. And we can't change it."

"That doesn't mean we did the frakking best we could. Lords, if that was the best…? That's the heresy, Kara. That's frakking sacrilege."

"Then… I don't know what to tell you, Lee. You shoulda fought harder."

"Yeah, well, you should have stayed. Just one godsdamned time, you should've stayed."

For a long moment, while ram-shaped Capricorn gleamed over their heads and the house that both of them cherished and despised loomed behind them, the air between them was cut by a pendulum they'd finally named, swinging between two extremes. Back and forth, it swung, from not staying to not fighting, from infidelity to inconstancy, from distrust to distance. Again and again.

And it was in that heavy silence that the klaxons from _Galactica_ shocked through the night air.

With reactions honed to instinct by years of training, they both surged from the porch ledge to their feet in one simultaneous motion. "Binoculars?" Lee asked without missing a beat.

"Kitchen closet."

From the lookout, with binoculars in hand, Kara could see what she hadn't before. Those bonfires she'd believed were celebratory were houses on fire. And the binocular sights were good enough that she could see civilians wielding guns that were military issue. "Explains the arms theft," she muttered.

The camp was ablaze. The temple was dark. And so was Bill Adama's cabin.

"What's the situation?" Lee was methodically opening closets, recovering relevant supplies: tool belts, flashlights, shortwave radios.

"Enemy forces in echelon formation around _Galactica_, numbering maybe eight hundred_._ An unorganized mob behind them. Two guards on our tent, which we should assume's been sacked. Large-scale Cylon resistance in northeastern quadrant, numbers hard to guess, maybe a thousand." She bit her lip. "Cylon resisters aside, I don't see any friendlies."

"Right. Probably most of our people are holed up in the battlestar." Lee said it calmly, also believed it, but wouldn't let himself think about the alternative. "I need to go negotiate the end of hostilities. Gods know where they think I am and how much of this is about me being missing. You don't think they're doing this in my name?"

"Don't worry about that. You ask me, this is Leoben's frakked-up Cylon humanization scheme whipping up the bigots and terrorizing the other Cylons. You're just a foil." Kara put handed him the binoculars and leaned back against the wall. "But you can't go down there, Lee. Not without an armed guard."

He winced as he got a picture of the chaos. "I have to go. To concede, and see if I can help Sarah Porter restore sanity_—_"

"Take a look. They are not in a negotiating mood, down there, Apollo. We have zero intel, zero probables…but there are a couple of certainties. There are people who hate you. They have guns. They will fire them."

Lee weighed her words as Kara pulled out some of the house blueprints from another closet, turned them blank side up and spread them across the master bedroom floor. She sketched a quick outline of the camp, X'd the location of the major structures. She thought rapidly, and out loud. "Shoot and scoot's not gonna get us very far, not with the numbers problem we have. Neither will infiltration, because we can't coordinate with _Galactica _to actually get inside, get some resources. _Hitei Kan _and _Greenleaf_ make air superiority dangerous—even if we could get to the Vipers."

"We don't even have handguns at this point, Kara."

Kara shot him a disgusted look; what kind of house did he think she'd built him? "In the safe in the study. Combo is the same as the tent safe minus fourteen. And there's a false panel in the south wall of the attic. Eight light weapons on site, two heavies."

Wordlessly, he shoved away from the floor. When he came back, it was to lay a sidearm on either side of each of them. "I scouted the house perimeter. Remains clear."

She'd made the hard calculations while he was gone. "Lee. Any way you look at it—we need to get to the temple. It's the high ground, it has the power grid, and we're gonna need one or both of those to make contact with _Galactica_."

He'd done the same math. "Agreed. And I have some ideas about how to maintain our cover en route." He bent with her over the map, and they submerged their problems in the way they always had: they planned another war.

* * *

><p>Karl Agathon was immensely grateful when the streetlamps in the camp went suddenly dark, for the third time in forty-five minutes. In the ensuing chaos, it was easy for his team to coordinate their moves past and through the militia that he'd learned was calling itself the Legion of the Twelve Tribes.<p>

"Rendezvous point, Temple of Unity, codename Artemis," he repeated to the Sixes and the Eight in front of him. The Eight, he couldn't stop noticing, was looking at him a bit strangely—but what the hell, all Eights looked at him a bit strangely. "_Galactica_ will send the Raptors by twenty-two hundred hours. Our goal is to evacuate toward Artemis discreetly, in groups no larger than four, to evade—"

He cut himself off as shells ripped through the air beside his head, and he dove for the Six and Eight closest to him, instinctively. The Six stayed low, covering her head with both arms. But Karl and the Eight rolled simultaneously toward a nearby fence and swung immediately to peer over it.

She found the gunman first. "Ten o'clock," she muttered.

"If he shoots again without announcing his target, we have orders—"

The gunman, red hat tilting back off his head, raised his gun in their direction, and before Karl could finish his sentence, the woman next to him aimed and fired.

He watched the look in her eyes as she did, saw her wince and steel herself in one fluid expression, and his brain took a moment to catch up with his eyelids, which started blinking rapidly, and his legs, which tensed because they wanted to spring at her. He thought he might burst into tears. He'd never been as sure as anything in his life as what he said next.

"Good hunting—Sharon."

"Good…" She choked out a little gasp, and then there was a lump in her throat too big to breathe around. "You _know._"

They both sank back down behind the fence. "I know… I'm sorry. I swear to the gods that I _know_ when it's not you—deep in my gut, I _know_ you—and you have to come home, Sharon, because Earth doesn't mean a damn without—"

"I can't." She swallowed. "You don't understand."

"I know you're pissed about Boomer—and you're right, part of me can't really imagine what that must be like—but I swear to you, I would never knowingly cheat on you, because I'm in love with _you_, not her or any other frakking Eight—"

"It's not that simple. I…" Sharon peered back the barricade, eyes scanning swiftly in the darkness, finding none to distract herself with. "Karl, I think I… I think I did something wrong."

"No, no, of course you didn't. It was my fault. I know that."

"No, listen. Years ago. Gods. We never talk about this stuff, because I've always been afraid that it—scares you. But… you know that I'm… that I'm the first Number Eight, right? Not that it matters, exactly. I mean, the next five were made within days, and we were all exactly the—"

"What does this have to do with Boomer?"

"Nothing! It has nothing to do with frakking Boomer." If she were honest, she was still, on some level, furious about Boomer, and that had made all of her decisions easier, but he had to know it wasn't the point, not tonight. "Listen to me, Karl. I _asked_ Delia to take my place so no one would be looking for me. I had to get away. To figure out where my missing memories were. And so no one would be looking for me—including you."

"Missing memories?"

She grabbed his wrist, held it gently, made herself tell him. Finally. "I heard some Twos talking—not long after we got to Earth—about how badly they wanted to forget something called the Petra Project. And I knew—for just a second—that there was something buried in my head, something I _had_ forgotten. I could feel the space where the memory had been. Every time I thought of it, it ached… and I was scared."

Karl's eyes stayed on her hand clutching his wrist. "What did you find out, Sharon?"

"Not enough. I trailed Twos for weeks. I was helping them build that frakking statue of Starbuck"—she rolled her eyes expressively—"and spying at the same time. It was only tonight, with the blackouts, that I was finally able to sneak into the base star, access the last vestiges we have of the central database. And… oh, gods, Karl, it's bad." She knew she was just being a coward, but she seized on an excuse anyway. "There's no time, just now. But—I have to find Leoben Conoy. He knows something that I have to know."

"OK. We need to send everyone else to the temple, and shuttle them to _Galactica_. And then you and I—we'll find him."

She nodded, jerkily.

"How bad?"

She bit out a word. "Murder." Then looked at the gun in her hand. "The bad kind."

Karl nodded slowly. He knew, without needing to ask, that she hadn't forgiven him. For that matter, he wasn't sure he'd forgiven her for sending one of her twins into the middle of their marriage, to sleep with him and raise their daughter—it felt like exploitation, like he'd been abused. But he also realized that now, in a poorly-secured position at the edge of a guerilla war, was probably not the time to argue about it.

He grabbed her shirt and jerked her back toward him, so that she fell face first onto him for a too-short moment. He pressed her to him with all his considerable strength, almost trying to absorb her into his body. She bit his lip playfully, in their old way, and pulled back.

"I love you, too, Karl," she murmured, but she couldn't meet his eyes.

He thought it would mean more, to hear that again, but there was new metal encasing his heart, a new grudge, and a new war all around them that meant that they were all becoming machines again. So he just grabbed her hand and set off for the nearest safe house.

* * *

><p>Kara couldn't contain a disgusted sound when she came into the temple's center vestibule and saw the statue of herself.<p>

"Flattering. Particularly the neckline," Lee muttered, though the face—her face, in hard stone— gave him an awful chill. "You pose for that?"

"In your dreams, Apollo."

They'd made it down undetected. They'd gleaned, on the way, that Sarah Porter was believed missing. Judging by the shouts from the commons, some seemed to think that she was dead at Lee's hands, others, that they had both been killed by some larger conspiracy of the Cylons.

"Now what?" Lee looked around. All the columns, and the dark shadows around them, made him edgy. They could be approached on all sides.

"The flares. There's a way up to the roof over…"

"_Kara_." A voice came from the center of the crossing.

"Oh, my gods… _Sam_!" As their eyes both swung Sam's way, Lee's face grew immediately guarded, but Kara's lit up. "Are you… I mean, you're _alive_."

Above the edge of the hybrid bath, Sam's face was ashen and grave. That he'd come awake—and tonight—in the damned hybrid bath… Lee realized only at that moment that he was, once again, standing right on the sidelines of Kara Thrace's miraculous frakking destiny.

He wanted to curse, but he stayed silent at her wing and listened.

Sam's voice was almost too quiet to hear, and he sounded strained. "I could say the same about you. What the frak is happening out there? No, don't answer that. No time. I was waiting for someone I could trust to come along. Of course it's you two. Starbuck and Apollo."

Lee stayed several yards away, scanning the perimeter, trying to keep his attention divided in case they were approached.

"What do you need, Sam? Should we—should we unplug you, get you out of there? And," Lee could tell she was choking on a frakking giggle, here, as she realized that Sam was still lying naked in the bath, "find you something to wear?"

"No time. No time, no time, no time. Listen to me. You have to go get the Horn."

Kara's eyes widened. "You know where it is?"

"The—what horn?" Lee couldn't believe they meant what he thought they must.

"The Horn of Cronus." Kara tried to remember why she hadn't told Lee about all of this—to spare him the worry? Because it made her seem all the more insane? Because she knew he hadn't wanted to talk about the fact she was late for a second date with death? It seemed pointless, now. "Hera said… I should have told you before, Lee. Hera said that my brother was coming—for the Horn—"

"_Hera_ said—" Lee was dubious.

"Your brother! Oh, gods, no, Kara, that's not possible." Sam's voice had new urgency.

"You don't have a brother," Lee said flatly.

"No, she doesn't—not exactly." Sam grip tightened on the edge of his bath. "No time. Listen. Kara. When you left—back on Caprica, when you left with the Arrow of Apollo—I got curious about what else might still be in the museum. I was… almost drawn to it. So we set up camp there, for a few days. You know, the Horn of Cronus hadn't been on display in forty years—but I found it. It was right where it belonged, in the left atrium, across from where the Arrow had been. Like someone left it there for me."

"And you took it? Gods, so it is here. Sammy. I've torn this camp apart. Where is it?"

"It's in my locker. Or it was. Just… you have to believe me, I never thought it was important, it was just a talisman of what we'd been through, just a… just a souvenir. I tested it for radiation, and somehow it was clean… so I kept it in my pack, at all times. Kara, you have to find it. I've been having these dreams…"

"Hybrid dreams?"

"If Leoben Conoy—or your… your brother—if they get their hands on it, you'll die. And thousands of others. Again. You have to use the tunnel. He's already ahead of you."

"The tunnel?" Lee was once again a step behind.

"There's a tunnel, under here—behind that statue, in the floor. I think it goes straight up into _Galactica_."

"It does." Kara nodded. It had been in that frakking drawing, and so she'd built it. She'd tried to visualize likely scenarios for weeks, which could tell her why she'd built the damned thing. It had never occurred to her that it would come down to this, crawling through a narrow earthen tunnel underneath a burgeoning civil war to fish the Horn of Cronus out of Sam's godsdamned locker. If only she'd picked up his things weeks before, like Hoshi had asked her to… it had felt too much like she'd be admitting he was dead, and she couldn't do that, so there his pack had stayed. Waiting for him. And now…

Sam leaned his head back. "Do you have a flashlight?"

She patted her belt. "Yeah."

"OK. On my count, I'll give you ninety seconds to open the hatch, and close it behind you. Then I'm going to throw the power grid for the whole sector so that you can get past _Galactica's _defenses. It'll take the whole camp down, for a few minutes."

Kara swallowed, and found herself looking at her own frakking statue for guidance. _Lords of Kobol… what the hell have you done to me? _"You're hooked up to that grid, Sam." Her voice was so quiet that Lee almost couldn't catch it. "What's gonna happen to you?"

Sam reached a hand out of the water, and the marriage tattoo on his arm trembled over his bicep as he did. He touched her face gently. "I'll finally be gone, Kara. My body's failing, even now." He swallowed, too. "But, hey. Don't worry. I've already lived a few thousand years longer than I originally planned."

Lee swung away, his chest aching for Sam, pounding for himself. There was nothing he could say—_thank you for being decent to her while she attempted to self-destruct? Sorry for being so indiscreet about frakking your wife? _He turned toward the hatch, to pry it the frak open, wishing himself out of this private scene. But Sam didn't let him escape.

"Apollo—Lee."

"Yeah."

"Do it right this time, buddy." He let the heavy significance of those words sink into the silence that followed them.

Lee heard him, and let the tears come to eyes finally, even as a wry grin came to his face. "I don't like my odds, Sam."

"Yeah, me neither. So go easy on 'im, Kara."

"Never." Kara was crying openly, pressing his hand between hers. Lee knew as well as she did that those tears were half relief, and half mourning. Once again, Sam had given her something Lee'd never been able to manage.

Absolution.

The truth was, Lee might never forgive her. No, probably never, at this rate. But Sam Anders had always been the better man, better because he hadn't had to try at it nearly as hard as Lee had, and if Kara hadn't been much better to him, well, it hadn't seemed to hurt him as much.

It wasn't what was killing him.

"See ya on the other side, babe." Sam laid his hands on the edges of the bath, looking ready to be launched, seeming to concentrate on something they couldn't see. "Counting one, two, three, four…"

His voice sounded like a hybrid once again. Kara was still clutching his shoulder when Lee grabbed hers.

"Kara. Come on. He's giving us time. But we have to go _now_." She looked at him, then looked down at Sam. She pressed her lips to Sam's head and muttered a swift prayer.

And then they ran, threw open the hatch and slammed it closed behind them even as the whole world outside went dark.

And Sam Anders went dark with it.

* * *

><p>In hiding with his wife, Gaius Baltar heard stomping and scratching on Bill Adama's roof for a quarter hour before he steeled himself to investigate.<p>

_Respect_, he reminded himself. _You need her to respect you_.

So he kissed his wife, whose hand hadn't left the bulge of her abdomen in hours, whose eyes had never looked brighter or more frightened, and stepped out in the yard to see who was on the rooftop.

He'd barely left the porch when he was knocked off his feet by the suck of air caused by the back thruster blast of a Cylon Raider which had been parked in the house's front yard.

"What in God's name…?" Gaius took several running steps after it, saw it spool its FTL and disappear in the air overhead in seconds.

And then he turned back to the house, to see that the Raider—its pilot, anyway—had stolen, of all things, Bill Adama's weathervane, now only a jagged lightning rod jutting up from the roof.

He shivered, thought about it. Lee Adama would have recognized his thoughts. Because Gaius Baltar swiftly calculated that he, too, was standing on the sidelines of Kara Thrace's destiny.


	16. The Cry of the Horn

**A/N: **_Just a timely reminder that there is an Act II, and that nobody needs to panic yet._

_Also, I posted two chapters at once. If you haven't read the previous chapter, go there first._

* * *

><p>Lee and Kara were covered in dirt as they crawled through the hatch into <em>Galactica's<em> tylium reserve tanks. They were mostly empty, now. The room was cold, when it used to be too hot to enter. It was strange to think that it'd be cold, forever, now.

Lee and Kara exchanged a brief glance, which said silently, _Which way?_ The route back past the ventral main batteries and up onto C-level would be fastest, but it would take them perilously close to the flight deck, where they might be seen and forced to answer questions, or worse, conscripted for another mission. The route forward, through the FTLs and up into the brig, would be much slower.

"Sam said he's ahead of us. Speed is the key."

Lee reluctantly agreed. But he never got a chance to see how that plan would have worked; they were halfway up the ladder when the man who was ahead of them came over the intercom. They both recognized him instantaneously. And they both froze as it became clear that Leoben Conoy had hijacked _Galactica's_ communication system.

"Kara Thrace. Please be advised that I'm on the external launch pad in a Viper. Come out of hiding, Kara, and bring the Horn with you. If you need inducement…" the radio crackled, "I'm prepared to fire on one civilian building every quarter hour until you meet me and tell me where it is. And God bless you, Kara."

They were still for a long, shocked second. "He went through the frakking _flight deck_ and no one stopped him?" Lee's tone was incredulous. "Where the frak is everyone?"

He hopped off the ladder, even as Kara began to frantically scramble up it before his incredulous eyes.

"Kara—wait. You can't mean to go after him."

"I have to. He'll do what he said. I know it. And I'm overdue for shooting that bastard out of the frakking sky."

"It's a trick. He knows something—he'll _say_ something, mess with you—"

"I know. But I can't let him kill anyone else. And—it's time I knew what he knows." She gripped the rungs tightly, as if to stop herself from climbing. "And _you_ have to go get the Horn, if it's still here, if he doesn't have it already."

She was like a coiled spring, and the weight that was actually holding her in place was in his eyes. He held her there. "Is this it, Kara?"

"I don't know." She didn't, but she also didn't want to know. _No goodbyes, please_. "Lee, I have to go."

"And that's all you're gonna say."

She thought of what there was left to say, felt regrets tumble like laundry in her head. _I'm sorry. I love you. Don't forget me. I'm sorry. Let me go. Be happy. I'm sorry. But not too happy… _"If you could manage to blow up that frakking statue—once I'm gone—"

He swung away. "Got it. Good hunting, Lieutenant."

"Good—good hunting, Apollo." And then she was scrambling up the ladder, not letting herself look back, and he was darting back through the FTLs.

As she passed through the battery chamber, Kara let herself regret not having gotten a last look at his face.

* * *

><p>Emerging from the Cylon base star with new knowledge that made sense of a few of his nightmares, Galen Tyrol happened to glance at the sky.<p>

It was the third time this evening that he'd seen a Raider flicker across it and disappear.

_I'm so sick of frakking signs_, Kara had screamed at him, months ago, receiving the one that had led her to build the temple. He'd laughed.

He was starting to get a solid sense of how she'd felt.

* * *

><p>Lee didn't see anyone on his way into the pilots' quarters, though he'd had to duck out of sight more than once. When he got to the locker room, he was simultaneously annoyed and relieved to see it.<p>

In Sam Anders' backpack, between two clean sets of tanks and under a half-full canteen of water, was the artifact Sam had claimed was the Horn of Cronus.

It looked like shit, Lee thought: green with age, worn on the underside. And it was tiny, too, no larger than two or three pyramid balls, one of which would be just a little too large to fit into its mouth.

He emptied most of the contents of the pack back into the locker—how had Sam had so many Leonid cigars four, almost five frakking years after the destruction of the colonies?—but slid the Horn itself back in and threw it over his shoulder.

And that was when he was caught.

"Apollo. Thank gods," Hotdog almost tripped over himself coming into the locker room. "Where have you been? Our evacuation plan's been shot to hell—your old man's AWOL, Helo's disappeared, and the Colonel's in the CIC losing his mind."

Lee felt the weight of the Lords of Kobol in the pack on his back. _What the frak am I supposed to do with the damn thing, anyway? Fly it back to Athena's tomb and shove it in Cronus's hands?_

_What are you gonna do now? _Kara had asked him earlier.

_Whatever I can to help the most people_, he'd said.

_You get off on that stuff_.

She'd been right, and so he let Hotdog lead him away from Kara and the flight deck, and toward Saul Tigh and the CIC, and ignored the feeling that somewhere out there, Kara Thrace was laughing at him, laughing under sad, old eyes.

* * *

><p>A hundred yards from the temple, Helo and Sharon drew up short, four dozen Eights and Sixes grouping behind them.<p>

"Is that… what it looks like?" Karl whispered.

Between each column of the temple stood a Centurion, gleaming in the starlight, guns extended and at the ready. They didn't look like a welcome party.

"Who the frak sent the Centurions here?" Sharon was incredulous. A horrified murmur was springing up behind them.

"They might have sent themselves." Helo bent to one knee and lifted his binoculars to get a steady reading on them. That they hadn't already opened fire was the only hopeful sign.

"The temple's our only avenue of escape! How are we supposed to meet the Raptors? How are we going to get to _Galactica_? To Hera? What the frak are we supposed to do, now?"

Helo glanced behind him. They weren't being followed; the civilian militia seemed to have no organized plan for the Cylons, as of yet, except to hold a line between them and the battlestar. A handful of Gemenese, unarmed, had been trailing them for sometime, but Helo didn't worry about what couldn't kill him.

Still, with armed civilians behind them, and rebel Centurions guarding the temple in front of them, there wasn't much to say except, "We're out of options. We should probably think about which of them we ought to surrender to."

Sharon's wide, horrified eyes followed him as he sat down on the ground and let his eyes scan the sky—where _Hitei Kan_ and _Greenleaf_ were looking and lurking.

And there it was. Damn. The plan he should of thought of hours before.

* * *

><p>Fortunately for Karl Agathon, Lee Adama was devising that same plan, even now. "The Centurions guarding the temple give us no options. We have to seize one of them. Probably the <em>Hitei Kan<em> because its carrying capacity is higher."

Saul was grateful for Lee's preoccupation with fleet specs—a hangover, he suspected, from his experience with the _Ocean Carrier._

"Spell it out, son. What do we do with it once we've got it?"

Lee's gaze was clear. "We evacuate the Cylon resisters, and anyone who wants to avoid the theocracy. We resettle. On another continent. They won't have the tylium to come after us more than once, if they even try at all."

"We held the fleet together through five years of hell—"

"We had an external enemy and it _still_ almost fell apart a dozen times. Now, we're turning on each other. An old story, Colonel, but you know that." Lee's tone was pointed, and the direction in which it was pointed was the ruins of the old Earth. "This is it. This is the only way we save our people."

Saul leaned forward on the table. "And what about the ones we can't find—Baltar and Caprica, Helo… your old man?"

That gave Lee pause. "You're right. We need a contingency plan." He thought fast. "So we take 'em both, the _Greenleaf_, too. They're almost defenseless, except for their FTLs. We leave the _Greenleaf_ here to give us a chance to make contact with stragglers and collect them."

Lee let his eyes travel around the room he was in, felt his heart constrict at the idea of leaving _Galactica_ forever—and that was before he remembered his house, up in the hills, the one Kara had built for him that he would probably never see again.

"The old girl's served us well." Saul Tigh had been watching him. "But we don't need her any more, Lee. We're right to leave her."

_You left me a hundred times over_, Kara was repeating her earlier point in his head. _You left me, you left me, you left me…_

He knew Saul was wrong about what he needed. But Lee Adama thought, as ever, about what the fleet needed, and shoved that feeling aside.

"Right. I'll coordinate the strike…"

* * *

><p>A blonde young man, sturdy but not tall, attractive enough but not exactly handsome, spun around the center of the temple, looking with satisfaction at the Centurions' backs ringing around him, enclosing this space. He kept his eyes resolutely away from the statue looming over his head, because the statue—what it tried to mean—made him too angry. He leaned back against his Raider, stroking it absently as he turned to stare at the dead man, collapsed in the tub in front of him.<p>

He sighed heavily. He'd meant to save these people, not destroy them, but then he'd always been too reckless by half. So Ellen used to tell him. And she might've been right, because he'd never intended this. But hell, it was impossible to control every contingency, as Lee Adama had taught him over a year ago.

Ellen… he wondered where _she_ was, if she'd made it through the labyrinth of song and story and fire by which he'd led all these others to Earth. He'd missed the old broad.

He had a duty, here, though, and thought it was fitting that he would be the one who'd carry it out. He fell to his knees next to Sam Anders.

"God of all things, hear my prayer." One of the Centurions' swiveled his head over his shoulder, at that, and the man noticed, cocked his head at it. He was glad he'd finally arrived to remove those enslavement belts from them. "Come on then." The Centurion came, watched a long moment, then cautiously knelt beside him. "Commend the soul of your son—one of my fathers—to heaven this day…"

The blonde man—whom Sam Anders had known, once, as Daniel—reached his hands into the water and placed his hands on Sam's shoulders. And then pressed him slowly down into the water, to be baptized in the wake of his death.

* * *

><p>Lee was using his Viper's sights to scan the air and ground as he flew, only half-conscious that what he was looking for was any trace, any trace whatsoever of Kara. She gotten into a Viper to pursue Leoben Conoy, and no one had seen either of them since.<p>

There. On top of the temple, at the rendezvous point. _Galactica's _rolling high beams had illuminated, for just a second, what looked like a flash of blonde hair. The someone who was standing there, all alone, was neither tall nor willowy enough to be a Six.

Lee immediately pulled out of formation, and switched his headset channel.

"Blue Squadron, proceed to _Hitei Kan_. I'm investigating a civilian rescue situation on top of the temple. You have your orders." Lee deeply believed that they could manage to commandeer _Hitei Kan_ without firing a single shot. He hoped they didn't prove him wrong.

"Roger that, Major," crackled Hotdog's voice across the radio.

In the darkness, he could scarcely make out the shape of the person he'd seen so clearly from above. He set his Viper down carefully, felt his front pouch to ensure the Horn was still securely on his person, and opened the hatch.

"Ah, Lee Adama, as promised." A voice he didn't recognize—a man's voice—rippled through the night.

And that was when Lee saw her, up in the sky. There were two Vipers, one chasing the other, tearing across the sky overhead. He saw the back one try to swing in front of the other and cut it off, saw it angrily fire across the bow of the other with reckless precision.

He would have known it was Kara if he'd last seen her 50 years, instead of 50 minutes, ago.

"Aha, and there they are," the man echoed his thoughts. "The stage is set." He sighed, sounding genuinely regretful, and then gestured to Lee with one hand. Lee felt a chill as he saw the glint of gunmetal grey flash in the night. "I'm very sorry to have to do this, Major Adama. You know that I feel a kind of—kinship—with you. But a prophecy, however poorly prophesied, carries with it certain obligations." The man's mouth turned down at the corners as he shrugged, lifted both hands, and fired.

The bullet hit Lee squarely in the shoulder—opposite of where Kara's bullet had, not so many years before, and mercifully higher. He fell back, his vision washing white with shock. When it came back, he saw the front Viper—Leoben—take a sudden nosedive for the ground, and watched Kara follow.

_Oh, gods, no, oh, please gods, no_. It had never occurred to him that he might actually have to watch her die.

Again.

Both pulled up from the field at the last moment. Their chase continued. Lee concentrated hard, and managed to flick on his radio.

"If you'll take me to the Horn, Kara, you can end this now," Conoy was telling her calmly, despite the rate at which he was repeatedly confronting the likelihood of his own death.

"It's… here," Lee croaked into his radio, but he wasn't close enough to it that it could pick up his voice. He turned to the man who'd shot him, whose motives he didn't understand, whom his instincts, not that he'd ever paid them any mind, felt was somehow on his side. "Tell them it's here."

"Frak you," Kara was saying to Leoben. "Tell me why you want it. Tell me how you even know it's here."

"You _know_ that already. I see patterns. What has already happened, could never have happened, without the Horn. And it needs to happen again. I should have realized it as soon as I saw that wreck, on the Cylon Earth. There are missing pieces. We have to find them. Together. Have I ever led you astray?"

"Heard that line before," the man next to Lee murmured. He reached, an apologetic expression on his fact, into Lee's front pouch to pull out the Horn of Cronus. "I'm not sure you would have given it to me any other way, Major. That must be why this happened." He pulled the Arrow of Apollo from the bag he'd had hidden behind him, and tossed it onto Lee's chest. "Although I _can_ offer this in exchange."

"Who…the frak… are you?" Lee demanded, trying to hold onto consciousness.

The man ignored that question, as if it were absurd. "Don't forget that you have certain obligations, too, Major. You made a promise. And even _our_ supplies won't last forever."

He picked up the radio. "It's me, Leoben. I have the Horn."

The radio went silent.

Then the blonde man lifted it to his lips, and, holding the radio in front of it, blew the Horn of Cronus.

Its high, sweet sound filled the air with music that Lee felt as if something inside him were making it, something pure and perfect, like the expectation he'd had when he was young of one day looking back fondly on his own life. It was as if he were doing it, to hear the Horn. So when tears sprang to his eyes, he wasn't sure if it was the sound or the pain in this throbbing shoulder that put them there.

His eyes found the two Vipers, in the sky. Kara seemed about to overtake Leoben again. And her voice came through the radio. He strained to hear it. "…swear I'll see… by the… other… Apollo…"

Her voice, one last time.

And then Kara Thrace, for the _first_ time in her godsdamned life, did exactly what she'd promised she would do: she simply disappeared, Viper and all.

Leoben Conoy and the man with the Horn went with her.

All the fanfare of a whisper in an empty forest, Lee thought. He couldn't make sense of it, couldn't begin to try, although parts of it were nagging at him... He let the Arrow of Apollo fall to the floor of his Viper heedlessly as he laboriously rolled himself onto the stone beneath his vehicle.

He wasn't sure which part of him hurt the most as he struggled for the steps, pressing his hand to his bleeding shoulder. He stumbled down to the central chamber, not exactly sure how it was that the clock was still moving forward, how he still had choices he had to make. But since he did, there was one in particular that was of pressing importance.

Lee didn't know whether he was about to die—he didn't know anything, the world had fallen apart at least four times today—but he had an idea that he would never have let himself pursue, if he weren't losing so much blood, if she hadn't just disappeared with Leoben and a stranger and the Horn of Cronus, if he weren't pretty sure that he would never see or touch just about anything she'd ever seen or touched, ever again, even if he lived, because he was leading a large-scale retreat to another continent, and she'd never find him there, even if she were ever coming back, which didn't seem very likely.

But he had a thought, and he let himself think it, now, and the thought was that, if he were dying, he wanted to see her face again.

He got to the main crossing in the center of the temple.

There was the group of Centurions, no longer on guard. They were huddled together now, a few yards to the south of the temple, staring up at the sky overhead much as Lee had been doing, moments before.

There were Helo and—was that Sharon?—and a host of Sixes and Eights, crowded behind the Centurions, looking uncertainly away from the temple, at the people coming up in crowds behind them.

There was Sam, lifeless underwater in his bath.

And there was that godsdamned statue of Kara Thrace, flames ringing her temple, the Arrow of Apollo in her hands (_gods, which one was the fake? _his head spun), the Earth at her sandaled feet, with what looked, now, like scorn in her eyes.

_If you could manage to blow up that frakking statue—once I'm gone—_

With his good arm, Lee drew out his sidearm. He shot her right between the eyes, eight, ten, twelve times, until the bullets were gone, and he kept firing as he fell down to the ground.

"_Gods damn you, Kara Thrace!" _He didn't even hear himself. He was screaming what he was thinking. It hadn't happened to him in years. Since New Caprica. These were words he'd normally screen, but that, too, was beyond him, just now. So he screamed them again.

That was why he also barely heard it when the Legion members, a Two, two Gemenese women approached him from behind. They floated in his vision.

He understood that they were new emissaries from Sarah Porter's government in the moment that they slammed handcuffs on his wrists.

"Lee Adama," one of the women said evenly, "you're under arrest for conspiracy to kidnap Sarah Porter. For the murder of Samuel T. Anders. For high treason against the democratic colonial government. And for blasphemy against the savior of humanity—may the gods bring her soul to rest—Kara Thrace."

Kara would have thought that—all of that—was really frakking funny, Lee thought, and he almost let himself laugh. But then he remembered: The strange man. A promise he'd made. The horn and the arrow. Kara's brother? Oh, gods, and Sam was dead. Where was his father? _Hitei Kan _and _Greenleaf_.

The pear tree. Oh, gods, that frakking pear tree.

"I need morpha," he said. He took his hand off his shoulder and let it bleed, then staggered with the new jolt of pain. Cuffed hands in no position to catch him, Lee Adama fell flat on his face.

And everything went mercifully black, the world having ended for the fifth time that day, as he damned Kara with his last conscious thought.

**(End of Act I)**


	17. A Cause

**A/N: **I know there've been some folks who were nervous that I'd disappeared and that this was about to be one of those permanent works in progress. No worries: break's over. I've had this on the backburner all along, and I don't know why-other than the fact that it's a nice long one-it took quite as much time as it did. Anyway, this sets up the rest of this story. Expect some hard turns. And thanks for staying with me this long.

* * *

><p>"Still no word from the admiral?" Galen Tyrol leaned back against a table in the CIC. He didn't sound it, but his heart was beating quadruple time. <em>How long before the idiots outside find a machine that can cut a hole in the hull and overwhelm us?<em>

"The old tiger's got a lot of cunning yet, Chief," Saul Tigh grunted, undoubtedly intending to sound comforting—a feat he hadn't yet managed, in the time since Starbuck had disappeared, Apollo had been arrested, and the admiral had gone missing. "He released Sarah Porter without being discovered. He'll find his way here."

Helo was unconvinced. "How? We're two hundred yards from _Colonial One._ The guns on the field mean it may as well be two hundred klicks. _And_ they have anti-aircraft guns out there now." He drummed his fingers on the bench beside him. "The real question is, how are we gonna get Apollo out of hack so we can get the frak out of here?"

Tyrol nodded. "And where's Baltar?"

"Frak Gaius Baltar." The Chief winced, but even he didn't plead Caprica and Baltar's case. That pair had an uncanny talent for survival, and no talent at all for making friends.

Helo shook his head. "We've got a bigger problem. We have to ask ourselves." He leaned across the table. "Can we really leave here without _either_ of the Adamas? What will that do to the new settlement's morale?" _And to ours?_

He didn't need to say the last part; they were all thinking it.

Saul scowled and kicked the heavy chest at Galen's feet to distract them. "What do you have in there that's so all-fired important, anyway, Chief?" Galen had refused to be parted from it even for seconds, since he'd made his way through Starbuck's tunnel to _Galactica._

The Chief shrugged. "Starbuck's notebooks. She was writing down everything Sam said, you know. The contents of Apollo's safe—I ducked in when the natives out there got restless. And some research I've been doing about…" he let out a sharp breath, determinedly avoided Helo's eyes. "About the creation of Models Seven and Eight."

Helo's lifted his chin, scenting something in the air, as Saul's scowl grew improbably deeper. "Surely that's better left in the past."

"It's not past." Galen gave up his determination to hold it in, to spare Saul, and especially Ellen, the pain of it. "I saw him tonight, Saul. I swear I did. Up on top of the temple. With Apollo."

"You saw…" Saul swallowed, didn't let himself be led. "Who?"

"_Daniel_." The Chief rubbed his forearms briskly. "Or maybe it was Nathaniel, or Gabriel, or Uriel, or…"

"Who are you talking about?" Helo fought the urge to go find his wife, who was reuniting with Hera in their quarters after too long an absence. She'd be interested by this conversation, he suspected. "Does this have anything to do with the Petra Project?"

"How the frak do you know about Petra?" Saul demanded. "Has Sharon remembered something?"

"She's remembered that she forgot something."

The Chief's brows raised his buzz cut a quarter inch off his head. "I need to talk to her."

"Well. I don't get to choose whether she talks to you." Karl's tone reminded them that Sharon had made his non-vote in her decisions perfectly clear, of late. "But—is remembering Petra—whatever it is—a good idea? For her?"

The Chief and Saul exchanged a long glance, and even in these two men, Helo could read the fear in it. "Probably not," the Chief conceded.

Helo looked away, blinking rapidly. "She's with Hera."

The Chief didn't waste time with more words, just strode out of the room.

When Helo looked back at Saul, he was horrified to see that the obdurate old colonel had his head buried in his hands. When Tigh raised it, it was to snap at the guard at the door. "Get my wife. Now."

Even as he did, Hoshi came rushing in, a short-wave wireless connector in hand. "Encrypted message from _Colonial One_, sir. I confirmed it—it's the admiral!"

Saul wrested the radio from Hoshi's hands. "Bill, where the frak are you and what are you up to?"

As Helo, Hoshi and the colonel listened to the admiral's sitreport, their brief surge of optimism dissipated abruptly.

* * *

><p>Lee knew, before he opened his eyes, that he was in a cell. It smelled like metal, it sounded like bureaucracy, it felt like death.<p>

When he did open them, it was still a little shocking to see Olivia Valerii, condemned to die any day now, crouched beside him.

Well. That meant he was in the large holding cell on _Colonial One_, where they'd moved her several days before to await last rites. So. _Galactica _hadn't been captured, or else they undoubtedly would have thrown him in its brig with a few dozen other rebels.

That was something. If his shoulder and soul hadn't taken such a beating, it might even feel that way.

"You OK, Apollo?" Olivia asked quietly.

There were guards, past two walls of glass, and not facing their direction. He remained on his back to avoid attracting their attention before he had to. _Think fast, Apollo_. Helo's team had been out on that open field; they weren't here, so they might have escaped. And Saul Tigh must still be aboard _Galactica_; if Lee knew the colonel, he wouldn't leave without Bill Adama. So where was his father? And Kara…

_Kara_.

He cut himself off, forcing his thoughts to regain in motion what she'd lately cost him in faith.

"Have you heard any chatter about the _Hitei Kan _or the _Greenleaf_?"

If she was surprised that these were his first conscious words, her tone didn't say so. "Both captured by rebel forces last night. The guards who dragged you in here said your rebels are winning the standoff because the government doesn't have access to anything that can fly." She shrugged. "Cylons and rebels have been evacuating up to the ships in Raptors, with cover from Vipers, for the last hour. I think they shot down a Viper or two, though. I heard some cheering."

_Frak._ Nothing ever came easy, he reminded himself. Still, if they had access to _Galactica,_ _Hitei Kan_ and the _Greenleaf, _they controlled nearly all of the tylium left on Earth. There were few greater advantages. Anyway, Lee could hardly bring himself to care about the dangers ahead. He was in a mood to get shot at.

But one thing was important, here, before he did what he had to.

"Did you kill Sharon Valerii, Olivia?"

She met his gaze without a hint of evasiveness.

"No. When she was shot, in that control room… I couldn't have saved her."

Lee believed that she believed that, and he saw the sorrow behind the calm conviction in her eyes. "Then would you like to help me break out of this place?"

He recognized the expression that sprang to her face from the halls of the battlestar, from the pillow beside him after he'd married, from his own mirror: hope made of ice, cold and transparent and fragile.

"Where… where would we go?" she asked cautiously.

"To the _Hitei Kan_." He hadn't sat up yet, but he was on autopilot. He felt what he always felt: Kara Thrace tugging him one way, the rest of the world, another. His training would get him through it. He responded as he always had. "We'll resettle with the evacuees across the sea. They'll need all the help they can get."

When Lee closed his eyes, this time, it wasn't to fool the guards into thinking he was still unconscious. He was thinking about starting all over again with a fraction of the resources. About whether they'd be pursued, whether this war would last forever. About how many of these people were evacuating out of loyalty to his father's name. To _his_ godsdamned name. About how hard a time the old man would have, torn away even from Laura's grave.

He was built differently than the old man, in that respect. Lee was deeply relieved to think he'd never have to look at that house Kara had built, ever again. That was the feeling, wasn't it, that odd, knotted heat and lightness clutching his chest—relief?

_Feel it later, Captain_. All those evacuees believed they needed him. That need had no bottom, would never have a bottom. He concentrated on them.

His shift of focus was, for him, an ancient gesture. _You can count on me_, he heard his own voice telling the new President Laura Roslin a thousand years before, struggling for conviction to match the words. _Of course I can. You're Captain Apollo_.

Captain Apollo's obligations didn't end just because his last glass hopes had broken.

"I'm with you," Olivia Valerii whispered.

He opened his eyes.

* * *

><p>Caprica was a vision of calm. She was the essence of serenity. She was the very soul of composure.<p>

She was dying inside, but her husband wouldn't have been able to bear it, so she buried it deep beneath several strata of tranquility.

"Nine weeks early. It's too soon." Gaius kept his back to her, facing Bill Adama's fireplace, as he erupted with this observation for the third time.

"Hera was five weeks early. It might just be that the pregnancies are shorter—"

"_Hera_ was born in a hospital—a second-rate military hospital floating in uncharted space, but still a _frakking hospital_, with _medics_, and _incubators—"_

"We don't have those things here."

"No frakking kidding!" He paced back and forth across Bill Adama's living room. "There's a civil war outside, and if those Vipers falling out of the sky are any indication, it isn't _going_ particularly well, and we're trapped here without any access to the rest of the _universe. _The number of things _we don't have here_ is approximately infinite. In fact—"

"Another contraction is starting, Gaius." She leaned back against the couch, projecting herself to a clean, sanitary medical chamber. And she kept her tone perfectly mild, even though she wanted to scream, more from frustration than pain. She gritted her teeth. "Would you mind thinking about disinfectants? Maybe the admiral has a bottle of wine around here."

"This is what I'm talking about. It's pure fiction, and I'd expect you, of all people, to know it, the idea that you can disinfect _actual_ wounds with _table alcohol_—"

"Have you ever assisted in a live birth, Gaius?"

"What, do you think I moonlighted as an obstetrician while I was reinventing modern communications technology? Of course I haven't—"

"On the farm. With your father."

"With my—" He bit off his own words. "Well, of course. Cows, sheep, the odd donkey. You don't seriously—well, but you're quite right, of course, on some level it _isn't_ all that different, not that you have much in common with a sheep, mind you, but—"

"And what would you need if I were a sheep? _Think_, Gaius, there isn't much time."

He finally met her eyes, and she let him see the fear buried there. "I believe you are about to be the only Cylon left in this settlement, my dear, because if the wireless is right, even the Twos have evacuated, now," he said at a whisper. "And I have no idea how we're going to escape this situation alive."

"One of one and a half, Gaius," she rubbed a hand roughly over her abdomen. "A problem at a time, if you don't mind."

The doctor shook his head, cleared it. "Right. One and a half. Two. All three of us. Sheep. Right." And Gaius, finally, set about preparing to welcome his son into the world, as his wife began, cool pacificity all but radiating from her, to pray to their God.

* * *

><p>"How do you know you didn't just kill that guard?" Olivia hissed at Lee as they crouched in a lodging recess four hallways portside of the holding cell.<p>

"I don't."

"Then how did you get off being so worked up about whether I let Sharon die?"

"That guard was an enemy."

"And enemy lives are worth less than ours."

She sounded like he had, in War College. "No. But you take stock of them at a different time. And that time is not now." A decade later, Lee could hear his own father in his tone, and grimaced at it.

But the old man's problem had been choosing targets, not accuracy when shooting, after all. _Agreeing with the admiral doesn't _always_ mean you're wrong. You don't think that anymore._

He still needed the reminder. Her eyes glaring remonstrative holes into his face weren't helping.

"How did you pull off impersonating Athena for so long?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're not a lot alike, is all." Boomer would have concealed her skepticism at a moment like this, and Athena would have spoken it. Olivia's anger was in a contained, but honest, middle ground. She softened a bit at that, though.

"Where are we going, anyway?"

"The president's quarters. My father had the Chief install an escape pod right off of the presidential head—oh, around the time Baltar was exonerated. A safety precaution, for Laura." He blew out a breath, wishing that just once during his own tenure as president, he'd checked on that pod. At least something had stopped him from removing the tylium from it. "Just past the latrine, there's a false wall. We just have to hope Sarah Porter's team hasn't found it yet, and that it's L-4 functional."

"L-4?"

"Atmospheric flight." They were getting to the _Hitei Kan_one way or another. "Coming up on the hard part, now. We need to get past the guards at the entrance to the presidential suite without alerting the whole crew. And hopefully," he shot her a quelling glance, "without killing anybody."

But as they swung around the corner, leading with their guns, it was to find that the corridor was deserted, the presidential suite unguarded.

Lee frowned. "I wasn't even living here and I left guards up. The sensitive papers that come through here alone—"

Olivia broke her crouch and trotted gingerly to the door. "Well, we're in luck, then."

A tic pulsed through his jaw as he punched in his ID number. "Gods, they haven't even changed the damned codes yet," he breathed as the hatch popped ajar. He gave the door a hard look, then clicked the safety off his gun. "Cover me," he muttered.

They burst into the room to be confronted by a second surprise. Sitting calmly at a table across from President Sarah Porter was his father. There was a chess board in between the two of them. Judging by the pieces at the side of the table, his father was winning handily, though both of his priestesses were in danger and he'd already lost a senator.

"It took you longer than I expected, Lee," his father said mildly.

"There was a little matter of returning to consciousness."

His father grunted. "You escaped from your cell—before I could get to you—over an hour ago." His eyes flicked to Olivia. "I see you brought company."

"You know me. Sucker for victims of the state."

Now Sarah Porter scoffed. "_She_ wasn't part of our deal, Bill. You for your son. That was the agreement. I can't let an unrepentant Cylon—and a murderer, on top of it!—escape justice. I _won't_."

"I didn't realize that you were the final arbiter of contrition, Madame President. In any case, your negotiating position hasn't improved since we made that deal—just the opposite." The admiral tilted his head toward Lee and Olivia's steady hands on their sidearms. "As before, the only thing you have on your side is my respect for democracy, such as it is."

Sarah Porter was sputtering an objection, but Lee's veins had gone to ice. "What deal did you make, Dad?"

"The one I had to, son." Bill gave one regretful look at the chess board, and got to his feet. "You—and Olivia—are going to get into that escape pod. You're going to use the coordinates already entered in nav panel. And you're going to get the frak out of Sarah Porter's godsforsaken colony."

Lee closed his eyes, at that. But Olivia's were grave and steady on his father. "And you, sir?"

"I'll release the president—in reality, this time. She'll place me under arrest and hold me on trial, for treason, in place of all of the evacuees, who will escape safely and will not be pursued."

Lee knew it was futile, but had to try. "Dad. We have the upper hand, here. She has no guards, no weapons—why don't we _all_ get in the pod and evacuate to the _Hitei Kan_? We could even spare all these people the hassle of living in a theocracy and take her with us."

"These people elected her. She's their president." The admiral held up a hand. "Where's Starbuck, son?"

"She's…" Lee let the night wash over him again, and a tremor went through the arm holding his gun. "Something happened. A man came with the—with the frakking Horn of Cronus, and he blew it, and she just_… _she just disappeared. Like she said she would." He swallowed hard. "She's gone."

Lee had never believed it, when he read in stories, that people 'aged ten years all in one moment.' But his father did, just then. The last of his robust middle age was gone in that instant. His eyes sank inward, devastated, and then he turned his hollow sockets on his son.

"You need to go, Lee. Help build the new colony. This is your cause. Remember what I said."

_Find a cause_. _"_I remember. I will. I swear it."

"_Admiral_. This doesn't make any sense." It was Olivia who objected. "There's _nothing_ to hold you here. And she'll have you executed, if you keep this bargain. Even you, sir. Maybe especially you, just to prove that she's in charge, now."

His father didn't react. "C'mere, son."

Lee felt his father's arms crush around him like a blanket falling over his full body and briefly blocking out the ambient light. For a moment, there was only the two of them—no old grievances, no defensive distance, no wary hostility.

He expected, reflexively, that his father would salute him, would say something that reminded them both that they were men of mission—"at ease, Major," his dad would say, and he would salute and nod and call him admiral and in sharing their sense of duty, they would show their love as they always had.

But this new world resisted it—it had demilitarized, and he and his father had simply become men, now, as much as they were soldiers, without noticing.

So all his father said was, "Sooner or later, son, the day comes when you can't…"

"I know it does. I know it."

"You'll do the right thing, Lee. I believe in you."

"I'll try my best. I'm sorry—I think I—I think sometimes I tried _too_ hard—"

"You grew up the hard way. Not your fault. I love you, son. Always have, always will." Lee heard the respect, as well as the finality, in his father's words. And then there was that feeling again, a knot of heat and light. He gripped his weapon tightly.

Bill Adama sank back into his chair. "Shall we finish this game, Sarah?"

Lee shook his head ruefully. His father was five moves from winning, and he wanted to make them. If that wasn't just _typical_. His throat tightened almost past bearing.

"I love you, too, Dad." He jerked his head at Olivia. "Now or never."

"We can't just—you're not seriously going to let him—"

"Come _on._"

His father had already opened the wall to the escape pod, and there she was—the "Lark," as the Chief had christened her, because he'd built this one on the admiral's dare.

Now all that was left was to suit up, start it—she started without a hitch, Lee was relieved to see—and open up the airlock to the sky, just about to lighten from black to the darkest blue part of dawn.

Olivia settled into the ECO position of the oblong ship. "Why the frak are you letting him do this?"

Lee was swiftly refreshing himself on all the odd controls. They were designed for a layperson; he'd personally trained Laura Roslin on the use of its navigation controls. She'd struggled. _Let's hope that when I run, you run, Major_, she'd said with that hint of mischief that had seldom faded entirely from her eyes.

And now he was running.

"I know my father well enough to know when not to argue with him." Lee hung his head just a moment, and then adjusted the controls to roll the ship onto the forward end of the flight pod.

"But—we don't have to argue. He's out of his mind. We need to go back—to… to kidnap him—"

"He doesn't want to leave her, Olivia!" Lee's grief finally spilled out. "He won't leave the place where he buried Laura. And he thinks… at least this way, he gets to… to atone." The rhetoric of religion still felt foreign on his tongue, but there was no better word to describe the outcome of the old man's amassed weight of guilt and grief.

Lee was a man who knew that staying, and surrendering, could be a form of love. So he understood his father, finally, though he couldn't articulate it. "We launch in five." His voice was thick. "Ready the ECM."

Olivia shot him another dark glance. "Ready."

"OK. Here we go."

Their lift in the air was turbulent as Lee adjusted to the unfamiliar controls. The whole craft was shaking, and it reminded him of… something? What?

Because he couldn't stop himself, he turned the Lark's small window slightly, in the direction of the house Kara Thrace had built him here, on a hillside only a few miles from where she'd landed _Galactica_ and saved humankind, built for a future that she'd imagined for him as a way of apologizing for the past they'd squandered.

The window moved as they rose and revealed, in the darkness, the dim outline of his father's cabin, with Laura Roslin's small white gravestone and its heap of memory stones nestled there beside it. That heap was what the old man wouldn't leave, and Lee didn't blame him. Leaving this place was making him sick. He didn't dare risk a glance at the temple.

But Olivia saw it, out of the rear observation view, and her head fell involuntarily against the glass. _Some 'temple of unity_'_, _she thought. Still, it tugged at her heart, to abandon that dream of a harmonious future, Cylons and humans, side-by-side. It felt ominous and momentous to leave it. It felt like they were cheating fate, somehow.

_PshooowAAAA!_

Thesound of an anti-aircraft gun opening fire shook them both out of the hold that this piece of Earth had for them, though it didn't come close. It was time to go. He diverted power to the thrusters. And the craft swung end over end, so suddenly he was staring back at the swiftly-receding Earth as they jolted through the fiery sky.

It was familiar. A comfort. Lee Adama looked back at Earth like he was looking for something—for someone. _For Starbuck._ And that was it, that was the problem of sitting and staring out from this shaky vessel. It was a thousand memories, jumbled and simultaneous: Escaping the algae planet without knowing where the frak she was. Pulling up and out of the maelstrom after he'd seen her Viper erupt in fire. Frantically scanning the red moon on which she'd had crashed, looking for any trace, any bare thread of a hope that she might be alive…

_And what happened then, Apollo? Laura told you to leave her behind, and you agreed. You asked yourself why'd you'd waited at all._

His fingers clenched around the nav controls as they broke the atmosphere and all but fell into the void of space. He thought of Kara, of what she'd said last night. _You left me a hundred times over. You left me. You left me. You left me._

He exhaled, and with just a breath, the same span as that soft breath in which she'd disappeared, came clarity.

_You fought the wrong war, Lee._

It had taken him so much frakking courage to stay. To wait for her, knowing she was in his brother's bed—to hold the fleet, and himself, in one place while she was lost on that moon—to walk steady, when she'd flown off for the frakking Arrow—to maintain his watch, when she'd married Anders. He'd sat at home, on _Galactica_, on the _Pegasus_, in his damn Viper, and had waited each time for her to come back.

It had felt, to him, like a kind of fidelity. And yes, it had taken everything he'd had; he'd thought he was forcing himself to stay, when all his pride and logic screamed that he should walk away from her. He'd stayed, and cursed her because she couldn't hear what his staying was telling her…

But he'd been wrong. No wonder that to Kara, his _staying _had felt like abandonment. _You let me go_. He knew what she meant, now.

He hadn't been stopping himself from walking away. That wasn't what had been so frakking hard. It had taken everything he'd had because he'd been forcing himself to stand down, instead of _fight._ He hadn't gone to her—hadn't made demands—hadn't flown into the frakking maelstrom that was Kara Thrace, even once.

He looked up, and there they were, the _Hitei Kan_ and the _Greenleaf_, floating in steady orbit. Waiting for him.

"New mission," he said, and suddenly everything was instinct and so everything was _easy_. "You know what I said earlier, about the Horn of Cronus—have you heard of it?"

Who was this Eight that her eyes seemed to stare at him from the bottom of a deep well that was always almost run dry? "I know the legend," she said. "The Horn disorders time. Cronus built it so he could confuse Diana, move around the pieces of her life so that she wouldn't know that he'd betrayed her until just before she died. So she would stay with him."

"And if I told you it was real?"

"I've seen from Athena's memories that the Arrow of Apollo is… is _something_ else, something not quite right," she said, "So I think the Horn could be. And the others, too—the Ring of Orpheus, the Shield of Atlas…."

Lee adjusted the wireless frequency, spoke into his comm link. "_Hitei Kan, Greenleaf_, this is Apollo. Requesting permission to board the _Greenleaf_."

"Welcome home, Apollo. We thought you might say that. Landing Bay C is prepared for your entry. Bear five-one-three, carom nine-eight-three."

"Roger that."

Olivia raised a brow. "What's going on, Apollo? I thought we were joining the evacuees on the _Hitei Kan_."

Lee switched off his wireless headset. "The Horn's real. It's why Kara's lost. In space, maybe also in time. She might be dead. Have been dead for a while. Be about to die." He set the DRADIS coordinates on the nav panel almost mechanically. "I don't give a frak. The _Hitei Kan_ will find a new settlement without me. I'm boarding the _Greenleaf_, assembling a team. And we're going after her."

She nodded. "You can't let her go."

"Guess it's a family thing." _Find a cause, Lee_. He aimed the Lark for the landing bay, and all conversation ceased as he brought it to its loud, sudden halt on the too-short deck. He leaned back in his chair, rolled his injured shoulder painfully as the airlock closed behind them, and readied the repressurization module. "You can still go with the evacuees. We'll put you on a Raptor—"

She shook her head. "You saved my life. I'm with you, Apollo."

* * *

><p>It took Lee and Olivia a while to disembark, and help the deck crew (such as it was, on this civilian vessel) figure out how to move and stow the Lark. So they didn't make it to the captain's quarters, to meet the Chief, Helo, and, to Lee's surprise and Olivia's utter shock, Sharon Valerii. The Chief forestalled any large-scale rehashing of Olivia's violation of Sharon's family and identity.<p>

"Let's cut to the chase. There's been a change of plans." The Chief clapped Lee on his good shoulder to draw him all the way into the room, shooting a warning look at Olivia. "We need to make a quick run across the universe. To C City. We were hoping you'd join us."

Lee raised a brow, decided to hear him out. "What's in C City?"

"Answers," Sharon said grimly. She, too, was peering troubledly at the other Eight.

"And old friends," the Chief said.

"Maybe enough of an uncontaminated tylium supply that the new settlement won't be doomed," Helo threw in.

The Chief reached onto the table behind him, and held up something Lee recognized all too well—the Arrow of Apollo, poised to swing on the end of a pole like a weather vane. The one that man who'd taken the Horn had tossed at him. "You gotta keep better track of this thing, Apollo." He gave the Arrow a spin, and it pointed directly over Lee's shoulder. He spun it again, and it stopped in the same place. The third time, it was precisely the same.

It was a reason to hope, even if that hope was glass. "'The Arrow, which directs them to Elysium,'" Lee quoted softly. That man had left it for him, the man who'd lifted the Horn and blown Kara away. Maybe it was the key. "It's pointing at something, isn't it?"

"Yep. It's pointing us the way we came, buddy. All the time, like it's its job." The Chief looked almost gleeful, and suddenly Lee was smiling, too.

There was a loud clanking in the hall. Lee and Olivia spun to find a legion of Centurions marching past, not in any kind of formation. Galen saw where he was looking. "Oh, yeah, that's the kicker. They're insisting on coming, too. Unfinished business." Olivia shuddered, at that, but the Chief was undaunted. "Whaddaya say, Apollo? One last dance?"

"I'm in," Lee said finally. Using the Arrow was the right place to start, in any case. He wasn't going to find answers, here on Earth. "But I have my own mission." He put a hand on Olivia's shoulder. "And she's with me."

The Chief shot her a dubious glance. "Great." His tone said he didn't mean it. "We'll fill each other in on the way. No time to lose."

"Wait." Sharon held up a hand. "Karl and I drew straws. I'm staying with Hera. It's too dangerous for her, on Caprica. They don't even make radiation suits small enough for her." Now it was Lee's turn to shudder. "But I need to talk to Olivia before I head to the _Hitei Kan_." The two women melted into the corner, and Lee saw Sharon grasp Olivia's hand—for projection, he assumed—and heard Olivia let out a small cry just after she did.

"The admiral, Apollo?" Helo asked quietly.

"He's… staying here."

Helo's eyes squeezed tightly, at that. "The colonel's staying behind. Gonna try to change your old man's mind."

Lee's jaw clenched against stating the obvious—that it wouldn't do any good.

"What about Starbuck?" The Chief's voice spilled grimly onto her name.

Lee didn't hesitate. "I'm gonna find her."

Karl grinned, at that, but the Chief just sighed.

"We have a lot to talk about on the way," the Chief said. "And for now, we've got jumps to plot."

Sharon rejoined them and grabbed Karl's shoulder to pull him aside for a private moment. "Hey."

"Hey. Guess this is another goodbye, sweetheart."

"I'm not abandoning you, this time, Karl."

He raised a brow. "Really?"

"I'm _trusting_ you. And trusting another Eight." She took a breath. "Trusting _this_ Eight." Who, though she didn't say it aloud, had fooled him for months. She strove for humor. "I can't shoot 'em all, you know."

Karl winced. "Keep Hera safe. We'll be back before you know it."

"Karl."

"You can trust me. I'll prove it."

She nodded, but frowned. "Do you think you'll ever trust _me_, again?"

He looked away. "Maybe understanding where you're coming from'll help me out, on that one."

She pressed her lips together hard, at that, but held back her tears. "Yeah. Maybe."

"I've never loved anyone but you, you know. Just you—the parts of you that are in _them_—over and over…" He sighed. "I wish you could know what that's like."

"I…" She shook her head. "I can't even imagine." She reached for his hand, felt his ring there, stroked her thumb over it quickly. "Come back from Caprica without a scared, pregnant Cylon bride this time, OK?"

"One's plenty for me." He pressed a quick kiss to the top of her head, and then waited to shut her Raptor door behind her. "Stay safe," he mouthed.

He felt proud of himself when he didn't turn back to watch her go. It showed a kind of trust, he thought.

On the other side of the ship, in the _Greenleaf_'s control room, the Chief entered their first jump's coordinates.

"What are you gonna do if you can't find her, Apollo?"

Lee was bent over the ship's manifest, open alongside its control manual. His shoulder was beginning to ache again, but he ignored it. He spared the Chief a brief glance. "Keep looking."

It wasn't only years of practice that kept Lee's face steady as they made their first jump back into the wide universe.

* * *

><p>In the minutes just after dawn, Kara Thrace reappeared in the air over the Temple of Unity as suddenly as she'd disappeared a few hours before.<p>

It felt damn good to set eyes on _Galactica_ again. She never wanted to be more than a short flight or a few days' walk from it, for the rest of her life.

She scanned the ground beneath her warily. _Ugh. Like Hephaestus Field after the pyramid championships. A godsdamned wreck._ But no one was out, so the violence must be over, or at least at a lull. She winced to see the burned-out mess where the tent she'd shared with Lee had stood. And then she instinctively reached beneath her seat.

_Frak, the care package is gone._

She knew what that meant: Lee had been right. She'd frakking skipped in time.

Kara set her wireless to an encrypted channel. Would anyone still be on _Galactica_? How much time had passed?

"_Galactica_, this is Starbuck. Do you read? I repeat, this is Starbuck_._" She entered her confirmation code swiftly.

"Starbuck." It was the Colonel's voice, and she breathed out a sigh of relief, though he sounded stricken. "Is that really you?"

"Yeah, it's me."

There was a long silence, and then: "Could you send that code again?"

"Wilco, Colonel." She scowled as she tapped her emergency ID numbers in one more time. "We've been around this block, Colonel—I leave for two months and when I come back, everybody thinks I'm a Cylon. Except this time we know that _you_ already are one, so…"

"Alright, Starbuck, pipe down. Since you were only gone for…" She could almost hear him checking his watch. "…for about six hours, we didn't have time to develop any conspiracy theories—"

"_Six hours_?" Her heart pounded. _Lee was right. _"Of course I was. _Frak_." She let her eyes dart to the hills now. _Frak, frak, frak_. "Requesting permission to land, sir."

There was a crackle on the line, and then came Ellen's voice. "Come on home, Kara."

On the landing deck, they were waiting for her. They closed the bay manually behind her. She pulled off her helmet, shook out her hair, and sat in her closed Viper for a long moment before she steeled herself to face them. She hoisted herself out heavily and resisted Ellen's attempt to draw her into a hug.

"Kara. Where did you _go_?" the colonel demanded. "You just disappeared. Apollo went off, dead set on finding you. They jumped away not twenty minutes ago."

_Twenty minutes. Six hours. Frak me. I was gone for two months!_

She slumped back against her Viper. It was still warm. And Lee had brought it for her.

"What happened out there, Kara?" Ellen was gentle, like she was talking to an scared dog with bared teeth.

"Lee found me." She let the old colonel pull her into an awkward embrace, now, let him pull her in tight. And then came the tears, and the terror, and as regular as clockwork, the guilt. "I think I'm alive, Colonel," she forced through her dry lips.

That seemed important, since she couldn't do anything about all the people she'd left in another time, on another planet. About Daniel, or poor Leoben.

Or godsdamned Lee Adama, with his blue mandala eyes.

The colonel's arms tightened around her, at that.


	18. The Sevens

**Chapter 17: The Sevens**

Word Count: ~5,400

A/N: The first mysteries of Petra—and how Kara fits into it—revealed. It's fun to write Lee when he's playing emotional offense. I should quit my day job so I can do it more often.

* * *

><p>On the far side of Earth's moon, Sharon had been refereeing debates about the location of the new settlement for hours.<p>

"Freshwater lakes! Five of them, larger than any in the Twelve Colonies!" Catman was insisting. "Far enough inland that we don't have to worry about them chasing us across the ocean—even if they could manage to build the ships without us."

There was a round of scoffing, at that. Most of what was left of _Galactica's_ crew was here in the _Hitei Kan's _"observation deck"—loftily named, given that it had no windows and had been in use as a storage facility for broken machinery for almost the whole exodus from the Twelve Colonies to Earth.

Those who had agreed to this second exodus on the _Hitei Kan_ had little in common except for a sharp contempt for the people they'd fled hours before. Sharon didn't know if it would be enough to hold them together. Military, Cylons, civilians of conscience or who were obscurely chasing fortune… It seemed like it had to crumble. Particularly given how little credible authority was left, here.

She looked around the room for the dozenth time, hoping to see _something_, some vital spark in someone's eyes. Seelix and Redwing had mutinied with Felix Gaeta, so Sharon knew that, amnesty or not, she'd never trust them again, and they knew they'd burned a lot of bridges, so they were deferential to the point of obsequy. Hex and Hotdog were men you wanted beside you in a trench, not back at headquarters, devising your battle plan. Doc Cottle was uncomfortable with power of any kind, and had refused it in no uncertain terms.

But there could be leadership in this room, couldn't there? Showboat? Hoshi? Romo Lampkin? Someone whose eyes were a little less sharp…

It was, of all people, Daniel "Bulldog" Novacek who stepped in, now. "The reports say the winters around those lakes is probably subzero," he put in. "One bad harvest and the winter'll kill us off."

Sharon looked at him consideringly. _Maybe. We're desperate enough_.

Two of the three Sixes present were growing as irritated by the impractical plan-making as she was. The third, however, was practically in Redwing's lap, though for mischief or for pleasure, Sharon had no idea. One of the others called for the motion that had been tabled two hours before to be brought to the floor.

Athena agreed. "Look, let's take the three viable locations we've scouted and put them up to a vote," Sharon was shocked by how weary her voice sounded. "_Hitei Kan _doesn't have capacity for all of us. There's no time to waste."

Surprisingly, there were murmurs of agreement from around the room, and Hoshi swiftly asked the handful of clarifying questions he'd need to draw up and distribute ballots. The meeting adjourned.

Sharon stayed sitting at her corner table. She knew she should go to Hera—in a moment, she would—but for the first time, she was facing what the fleet would look like, if nothing in their situation changed. No Admiral, whose voice alone had stopped more than one riot, and whose license to send in guns had stopped dozens more. Not even Saul Tigh, with his steady insistence on _order_ and _duty, _or Starbuck and Apollo, with their obscene wealth of talent and luck. None of Dr. Baltar's capacity for turning shit to gold. The president, for all her tyrant's edicts, all her smug composure, would have been a welcome sight today, as would a hell of a lot of other people who were dead, gone, missing.

And Karl. If Karl were here, he would have been able to end the meeting two hours ago just because everyone _liked_ him.

"Thinking about your husband?" That was Bulldog, who'd quietly stayed behind with her.

"I don't think everyone's realized just how bad the tylium shortage is," Sharon said quietly. "We're going to have one, maybe two chances to fly a Raptor back here, pick up the Colonel and his wife, the admiral, Dr. Baltar…"

"Your husband, the Chief, Apollo… They'll have a hell of a hard time finding us. If they ever make it back to Earth at all."

Sharon swallowed. "Yeah."

"We've been through worse." His back straightened at that reminder, as if he'd reenlisted even as he said it.

"Maybe." And hers straightened, too. She saw him notice it. He was looking at her so gravely. When he began to speak again, she figured out why.

"You know, there was a time, oh, a year or so into my captivity with the Cylons, when I felt my mind starting to go. They wouldn't let me kill myself—I'd've killed myself long before then, if I could—but, I don't know how to put this… it was like my brain was melting, all my thoughts fusing together, so I couldn't distinguish shapes from colors, my name from other names, could feel words themselves starting to slip away."

Sharon nodded. She'd known about Novacek, known they'd captured a human across the armistice line. Godsdamned sure had noticed his name.

"We should have killed you," she said softly. "We killed the others who crossed."

He nodded. She hadn't surprised him, with either her prior knowledge of his captivity or the fact that there'd been others. That surprised _her_. "But you didn't," he smiled a little. "Cold, cruel Cylons. Because of something as silly and sentimental as my name."

Her eyes clouded. Not with her own memory, but Boomer's, the words that had caused Sharon Valerii to be dispatched as a sleeper agent on one of the less important battlestars, _Galactica_. Standing next to Bulldog's prison, she'd tugged on Cavil's sleeve, pleading with him, a Two's hand on her shoulder as she did it. "Not _Daniel_. We can't kill him. I can't go through it again. _Please_." Cavil had laughed in their faces at the irrationality of it.

"You knew about him? About Daniel?"

Bulldog nodded. "He came to me, once." The words were casual, but they slid into Sharon's heart like a fistful of needle-sized icicles.

"He…" She thought about what the Chief had told her earlier, what she thought she'd seen, herself, on top of the temple, tonight. "He came to you."

Bulldog nodded. "I was never completely sure he was real, but I saw him again last night. Through binoculars. I was watching the Admiral's house, on Colonel Tigh's orders. He was up on the roof." He shook his head. "Damnedest thing, because I swear the man who came to me was twenty years older than this one. Still, I'd recognize him anywhere. He saved my life."

Sharon wanted arms around her, hard and tight. She wanted to burst into tears. "What'd he do?" she managed.

"First, he reconfigured the monitors so that they—I don't know how he did it—but they couldn't read my brainwaves, after that, couldn't figure out what I was thinking. So I could be myself, with no one watching." He let out a sigh. "Like a human being. Just a little bit free."

Sharon nodded. She'd longed for that freedom even before she'd set eyes on Karl Agathon, not that she could have named it.

"And he said, 'Don't worry, Bulldog. You'll make it to Earth. Listen to me, you're one of the luckiest people alive. All because you have my goddamned name.' And I don't know why, but… I believed him. And so I just choked out the only words I had left—I said, 'Thank you, thank you.'" He shrugged. "And then he said, 'Just don't forget how to fly, once you're there.' And he left."

Sharon shook her head. "It's not possible."

He laughed a little, at that, because of course it wasn't. "Which part of it?"

"None of it."

"How do you figure?" He was smiling broadly, now, and why not? He'd been failing to reason his way out of this memory for years.

She blew out another breath. "Because I killed him myself, Bulldog, decades ago, with a couple feet of razor wire. And John Cavil made sure he could never be resurrected."

That killed the grin on his face, too.

* * *

><p>Lee was sprawled on his back in his bunk, a cigar clenched in his teeth. The cigar had been manufactured back at the settlement by some of the former crew of the <em>Zephyr<em> from a wild crop they'd stumbled on. It tasted, to Lee, like Earth: fresh and full and sensual. Like spring. It was _earthy, _he decided.

He was surprised to find that he missed Earth. It had snuck up on him, had become home, as much as _Galactica._

Now, in his bunk on the _Greenleaf _halfway between Earth and Caprica_, _there was a binder at his feet. Eighteen pages inside of it—hardly needed a staple, let alone a binder—eighteen pages that were, Galen Tyrol had told him, all the official information about the Petra Project that had survived the exodus from the Twelve Colonies.

It was all anyone knew, and it was all a lie.

Tyrol's story had come out in long hours over cups of what passed for coffee these days. (Lee swore to the gods that when they got to Caprica, the first thing he was doing was ransacking every fallout shelter on the damned planet for coffee beans, which he would never, ever share, for any reason.) The story had come in fits and starts, with big holes which Sharon's memories, through Olivia, and Ellen's, through the Chief, hadn't been able to fill.

There were some questions that Lee suspected only one man alive could answer.

Because so much of the story was so devastating to the women Lee and Helo loved, the Chief and Olivia had kept shooting them apologetic glances, or stopping and saving the hardest explanations for when they were ready with their next barrage of questions.

"You think it'll change anything for her? If she's still… alive?"

That was Karl, in the bunk across the room. The ship was big enough they could've all had their own frakking suites—the Centurions didn't sleep, and preferred to simply power down when they weren't engaged in another task. But the four of them, military bred, had agreed to share a bunk room.

"What, for Kara?"

"Yeah."

Lee thought about it. "No."

"But I mean… if he didn't _leave_ her…."

"He wasn't there. She got hit. The reasons don't matter a damn, not anymore." Lee's tone made it clear that he didn't want to talk about this. He knew Kara wouldn't want them to.

Karl sighed, a long-suffering sigh that Lee supposed was a hangover from having conversations like these too many times with Kara herself. "Yeah, but didn't you feel better—when you forgave your old man?"

Lee blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling. "It's not forgiveness." He'd been around this point in his head often enough to be sure of that. Kara got it. You didn't stay broke—at least, Lee hadn't—well, he mostly hadn't. But forgiveness just wouldn't be right. "It's understanding."

They could stay in their racks because the Chief was on watch, now, with Olivia. And a good thing, because Helo and Apollo were reeling.

The story that those two had told them had been shocking.

"Forty-one personnel," Karl said now. He nodded at the binder by Lee's feet. "That thing says… forty-one personnel. He could be there."

Lee said nothing, to that. He was so tired of hoping, of seizing reasons for hoping. Anyway, all his hope could only go one direction, right now, and it was one already stretched too thin.

The whole thing smelled wrong, besides, but Helo must know that as well as he did.

He closed his eyes, put his mind to work ordering the images, the flashes of story that the Chief and Olivia had given them. "Can we go through the timeline?"

"I don't know if I can handle it yet, Apollo."

"Just… make sure we have it all straight."

"Fine." Karl stubbed out his own cigar and flopped over onto his stomach. "It begins when the illustrious Final Five arrive in the Twelve Colonies. Middle of the First Cylon War. They go to Virgon, fake their papers. Use some shiny inventions from back home to get hired on at Greystone Labs. They have a big problem." Karl sighed. "They miss the folks back home."

* * *

><p><strong><em>Armistice Day, 34 Years Earlier<em>**

_"What have we done?" Tory hissed at Galen Tyrol._

_"Am I crazy, or was this your idea?" the Chief shot back._

_"They're gonna come back," Sam said dully. "They're gonna want us to make more of them."_

_Ellen clutched Saul's arm. "More than that. They're going to turn John against us. Have you seen the way he looks at the Centurions? Half like they're his brothers, half like they're his servants. And he's been whispering with Leoben…"_

_She and Tory—the only ones among them with well-developed political instincts—shuddered._

_"We ended the war," Saul reminded her, "and we bought some time." They'd learned enough from war to know they didn't want to take a side in this one. "That has to be good enough, for now. We bought peace."_

_Peace, and time to reconstruct more of their long-lost friends and loved ones._

_"I think we should quit," Tory whispered. "Ellen, I've seen what John is doing to you. He's not your father, honey. We can't get them back. And Sam, Leoben's not Ben. He never could be."_

_Sam slumped, but Ellen's spine stiffened. "You're wrong, Tory. So what if we can't implant memories and personalities of people whose memories we never stored? Just to see them, people who look like them, to have our families back, just that much…."_

_Sam shook his head. "Tory's right, Ellen. We're fooling ourselves."_

_"They're going to make fools out of all of us," Saul interjected. At Greystone's insistence, he'd enlisted in the colonial fleet to integrate some of the war technology they were developing. He'd been fighting the Centurions for months before they'd brokered this deal. His eyes, and his greying hair, said that the whole business had taken a toll._

_Ellen ignored her husband, knowing she could bring him around any time. "Do you want to box the Twos, then, Sam?"_

_"No! God no, of course not."_

_"That's enough, Ellen," Saul said firmly, but his wife paid him no heed, as usual._

_"And Tory, do you really want to call off the plans for Model Five?" Galen's hand slid up to her shoulder. The Five was modeled on the cousin she'd been raised with, whose parents had raised her. Adam, her best friend._

_Tory buried her face for a moment in Galen's neck, and then lifted her head. "No. No more than Galen wants to call off making the Three."_

_Galen Tyrol sighed, and met Saul Tigh's eyes in rapprochement. He avoided looking at Sam. "You were right. We bought some time."_

_"But Sam's right, too. They'll be back," Tory said darkly. "We'd better be ready."_

* * *

><p>"So the Final Five make the first five humanoid models. And they realize—what did the Chief say?" Lee frowned in concentration. "'They were family, but they didn't make up for the family we lost.' "<p>

"Yeah," Karl reached over, grabbed the binder off of Lee's bed as though there were answers in it. "I can see why they tried, though."

Lee was still puffing on his cigar, but the taste was beginning to go stale. "Really? You'd do it?"

"Try to bring my sister, my parents, back to life if I could? Yeah, of course."

"Even if you _knew _they wouldn't look quite the same, or have any of the memories, or the personality—"

"You wouldn't really believe it was impossible. I don't believe it, even now. If you handed me a red button that'd bring my sister back genetically, I'd press it and hope for someone who looked just a _little_ like her, you know? To have her back, just a little."

"Yeah." But Lee was thinking, _no way._ He didn't know if he'd bring back Zak, or his mother, or Gianne, or Matt Imolan, his best friend from childhood—any of them, so readily. He wanted to think it was wisdom; he wanted to think that he'd've known all along that the Final Five's experiment would only end up making them _more _lonely.

But maybe it was just guilt.

Karl was ticking off a second finger, now, though. "So they make a plan to hide their research from the Centurions' spies. Greystone Industries buys Petra from the government. It had been an all-purpose bunker—built during the war to protect the president and the Quorum indefinitely, in case of an all-out nuclear holocaust." Karl shook his head. "Can you even imagine what kinds of other facilities the government must have built if that one went up for _auction_?"

"All the government bunkers would've been found when the Cylons hacked the defense grid." Lee was glad his voice sounded pitiless; the idea of Cylons hauling people out of those shelters in the weeks after the attacks and slaughtering them still had the power to shake him. "Anybody who took refuge in them is long dead."

Karl blew out a breath, and Lee remembered he'd seen some of those piles of bodies personally, during his time in the resistance. "So anyway, they experiment with making a sixth model, talk about offering her—just her—to the Centurions, as a weapon."

Lee swallowed. "And it's around that time that Anders meets Dreilide Thrace."

* * *

><p><em>"Hey, man, great song," Sam managed. He was swaying on his feet, had started drinking almost seven hours before. The bar was closing, so he'd only just stopped. "It's just," haunting, he was thinking, but he said, "…great. What's it called?"<em>

_A small smile flitted over the face of the young man at the keyboard. He'd played out this scene with other drunken strangers, on other nights. "It's called 'Conception'," he said easily._

_"Conception? You a father?" Sam asked, sinking without being invited onto the bench next to him._

_"I will be soon," the man said, a ghost of tension flitting across his vision. He got to his feet, started pulling apart the wires that had amped his array of instruments, this evening. How did he play so many, so well, without networking them and playing them all through a computer? "You?"_

_Sam thought about Julia, lost to the genocide back on the planet he'd abandoned, remembering she'd wanted to try for kids. All his talk of resurrection hadn't swayed her. Then there was Leoben, emerging from his genetic bath with features so exactly like Sam's little brother, Ben, that sometimes he could hardly bear it. "No," he said, "I don't think I'd be a very good father."_

_The man's smile was grim, now. "Me, neither," he said. "But I'm gonna give it a try."_

_Sam took in his ring, blurry as his vision was. "You married?"_

_"Yeah. I am." The man snapped a lid shut on his lute case. "You need a ride home, man?"_

_"Nah, I live… too far. Up past Blackmun's Roost."_

_"That's where I'm heading."_

_Next thing Sam knew, the man was shaking his shoulder. "Hey. Man. You gotta wake up, tell me where to take you."_

_Sam groaned._

_"C'mon. Where's home, buddy?"_

_"Earth," Sam managed._

_"Right. And mine's Kobol. I'm saying, where d'you sleep at night?"_

_"Petra," Sam opened his eyes, squinted at the intersection. "I'll just get out here."_

_If he'd been sober, Sam would have been impressed with the man's swift reaction; he maneuvered the car to the side of the street and stepped on the brakes before Sam tipped himself out of the passenger side. And ran around the truck and caught him before he hit the ground. Quick brain, quick hands._

_"It's just this way," Sam muttered, comforted by the arm over his shoulders._

_"There's not much out here," the man said doubtfully. "Unless you live in that warehouse."_

_"'S'not a warehouse."_

_The guard at the door was blonde and towering. The darkness, and her uniform, did little to disguise her astonishing beauty. "Hello, Dr. Anders. May I see your friend's ID?" she asked the other man briskly._

_The man fished out his wallet._

_"Crew Sergeant Dreilide Thrace, retired active duty, current army reserves," she muttered. "You don't have clearance."_

_"He's with me," Sam said._

_"Dr. Tigh asked that I maintain the clearance list," the guard said. Dreilide was a little confused; where was the list? How had she known he wasn't on it without looking at it?_

_"Dr. Tigh is not any more in charge here than I am." Sam drew himself up to his full height, and spoke almost without slurring. "He's with me."_

_The guard relented, her mouth turning down at the sides as she did. "On your authority, Dr. Anders," she said, and stepped aside._

_It didn't look like a warehouse, inside. "Dr. Anders?" Dreilide Thrace asked. "What kind of doctor?"_

_"The drunk kind," Sam said, and he entered a fourteen-digit code so swiftly that Dreilide had to doubt it. When an elevator door opened, Dreilide hesitated, but eventually stepped inside._

_"Who was that woman?" Dreilide breathed. "What is this place, that she's a guard?"_

_"Oh, her?" Anders was indifferent. "She's one of the Sixes. Right, you probably recognize her because we modeled them on Bera Bowman, the old film star." He fell back against the elevator wall, as the thing seemed to pick up speed as it burrowed down into the ground. "Don't get attached, friend. We're giving all the Sixes to the Centurions, to stave off the next war."_

_Dreilide backed up against the elevator wall. But his racing heart was a little comforted by the tear tracks he saw marking Sam Anders' cheeks._

_"Where are you taking me?" he asked softly, and sank to the floor of the elevator next to the drunken stranger._

* * *

><p>"They hired him on as a guard, leaned on his army qualifications. Let him play the guitar, write music at work. So he could support a family."<p>

Lee nodded thoughtfully. He knew perfectly well that the military didn't pay NCOs worth a frak. Nor did piano bars. A low-risk, well-paying job in the private sector would have seemed like manna from Elysium. He could be home for dinner, go out at night and play a gig. "What I don't get…" Lee shook his head. "I mean, he _knew_ they were Cylons. He knew for months before—what they did for Kara. How did he justify it, to himself?"

Karl shot him a look that said _I thought we were past this_. "They were his friends," he reminded Lee. "He knew they weren't out to start a war. They worked for frakking Greystone Industries, for frak's sake." His tone said: _Dreilide Thrace knew the world was morally complicated, Lee. He didn't see the world in Adamavision, black and white. It wasn't all A Cylon is A Cylon is A Cylon._

"Yeah, that bastion of colonial patriotism, Greystone Industries." Lee rolled his eyes. Military contractors were the only people he'd wanted to work for less than the military.

"The point is that he knew them. And he knew the first five, too. Knew they weren't—monsters."

"Weren't they? After the first five, they made the Six to _give_ her to the Centurions." The story had been riddled with little monstrosities, like that one.

Karl sighed. "It was a hard choice. They thought it might serve a greater good."

Lee had done the moral calculus here, already, and wasn't impressed by the results. So he was hardly listening to Karl now. "The Seven, they made to save Kara Thrace's godsdamned life." His fingers clenched around his cigar.

"And the Eight," Karl's face went bleak, "to get rid of the Sevens."

* * *

><p><em>"So I bring you the umbilical cord blood," Dreilide repeated dully, "and you can make bone marrow in…how long?"<em>

_Outside the doorway of his daughter's intensive care unit, he was leaning on the wall, eyes rimmed red, looking as though he'd been tortured._

_Inside, his wife was sitting with their newborn daughter. The silence inside was heavy like thunder._

_"A few months," Galen Tyrol clapped a hand on his friend's shoulder. "It'll be dicey. I saw her file. The doctors aren't sure she'll hold on that long. But we'll work as fast as we can."_

_"Is it… legal? I thought stem cell research was prohibited?"_

_Galen Tyrol bit his tongue to stop himself from asking what he thought they'd been doing, down here. "You know we can't clone the tissue by itself," was all he said. "She doesn't have enough healthy tissue for us to start from."_

_"So you're going to make another person. A twin."_

_"Yeah. She won't be exactly identical in appearance; the genes, as we receive them from humans," he ignored Dreilide's wince, "allow for some variation. But she'll be a genetic twin, yes."_

_He gripped Galen's shoulder. "You won't… do to her twin what you did to the Sixes?"_

_Tyrol's mouth dropped open. He hadn't realized that Dreilide had ever even heard of a Six; they'd dispatched all of them past the Armistice Line before Dreilide had started working here._

_"No. She'll be part of our family," he said firmly._

_"OK." Galen Tyrol had been through this grief and fear—and the loss that followed it—several times over. So Dreilide Thrace looked impossibly young to him, at this moment. "OK. I'll bring the blood tonight."_

_"We'll be ready."_

* * *

><p>"Along comes Ellen," Lee almost smiled, at this, because he had a lawyer's appreciation of a story that made <em>sense<em>, "and she's jealous of Three, she'd been jealous of Six. She thinks the colonel's cheating on her."

Karl snorted. "Irony, thy name is Ellen Tigh."

"She doesn't want any more lady Cylons running about. So she gets into the DNA code, gets a little help from some of the first five. Tweaks it so that Kara's twin is, effectively, fraternal. Is male."

"Is Daniel." Karl shrugged. "But Starbuck gets her clean blood and marrow."

"They only make seven Sevens. Once Ellen changed the code, that's how many they needed to be sure one of them was a match. Statistically, Chief said. Daniel, Gabriel, Uriel, Galadriel…"

"Nathaniel, Ezekiel and…" Karl struggled. "Asriel."

"A couple of years go by. By then, Cavil's spilled so many of their secrets to the Centurions that there's almost nothing left. He's jealous of the Sevens—they're frakking prodigies, especially Gabriel—but the real problem is that he thinks that they're onto him. He wants to show up Daniel almost as much as he wants to get rid of him. So he builds the first Eight with no genetic model, all from scratch. No one had ever done that before."

Karl was grimmer about this feat. "And encodes her to be an assassin."

* * *

><p><em>"There's no other way to save them—save all of them," the Chief cut past Tory's objection, "except to make John think they're already dead."<em>

_"We can't save all of them," Tory looked haggard. They all did. "He's already killed three Sevens, Galen! I'm sorry, Ellen. But we need to box John's whole line. There's just no other way to end this."_

_"Boxing a whole line is mass murder," Sam said. He drew a breath. "But maybe we need to make an example of one of the Ones—"_

_"Murder is murder," Ellen interrupted firmly._

_"Yes!" Tory exclaimed. "It is! And if you'd been the one to discover Galadriel face down in the photo baths this morning, you'd know it as well as I do!"_

_"We don't know that John is responsible for what… that Eight is doing," Saul interrupted. "Leoben seems to be helping."_

_"Leoben?" Galen shook his head, not entertaining the idea. "He'd betray God and all of us before Daniel. He made that promise before God and all of us, actually."_

_Tory agreed. "We know it was John who created the Eight. It's not Leoben. It's John."_

_"Don't you see? We created John, Galen." Ellen's voice had a keen edge of franticness to it. "We can't just kill him because we don't like what he's doing. We need to reason with him."_

_"The first priority is that we need to save the Sevens who are left," Sam submitted. "That's why Galen's suggestion is the best one. John'll think they're already dead."_

_"But… close Petra?" Ellen's voice was faint. "It's home."_

_"Not to John."_

_"We'll come back for everyone inside in a few weeks, Ellen," Saul reasoned with her. "They could survive for decades down there, with the hydroponics and the planetary core reactor. We have to convince John it's destroyed."_

_Tory blew out her breath, beginning already to plan. "Right. We just need to lure John—and his Eight—away from there. Keep Nate, Zeke, Uri, and Gabe safe."_

_"Her name is Sharon," Ellen said finally._

_"Who?" Tory frowned. "The Eight?"_

_"Yes. We should know her name. She's the one who has Daniel's blood all over her hands." She turned to Tory. "And I _did _find his body, so I think I'm qualified to talk about what murder looks like." She shuddered. "We assembled them ourselves. And still, I've never seen so much blood…"_

* * *

><p>"And that's how we got that binder. 'List of Government Resources Destroyed in the Recent Fire at Petra Research Facility Division of Greystone Laboratories', dated twenty-three years ago." Lee kicked the binder to the floor, now.<p>

"Except there was no fire."

"No. They staged a simulation of collapse, showed John the evidence. The government was told there was a fire as a cover-up. The Chief shut down all routes of exit to save the Sevens from the Ones."

"And he and Sam and Tory, the Colonel and Ellen—they never made it back. Cavil wiped their memories and sent them out into the wide world as humans."

They laid back in the bunks, each imagining what it might be like to spend several decades underground. Lee grabbed the binder by his foot, opened it again, read the list of words yet another time. "Haladroscopes, water filtration systems, dozens of experimental imagers, sorters, colliders…"

There was one item that Helo didn't need to review. "And forty-one civilian personnel. Trapped underground."

"Including," Lee looked up, because of course this information wasn't listed on the page, "four Sevens."

"And the Chief thinks one of the forty-one is Dreilide Thrace, who left for work one morning and got trapped there past the end of the worlds." Helo started to laugh, now.

"What the hell is so funny?"

Helo was laughing too hard to speak, for a moment. He put his hand over the back of his mouth. "I was just thinking," he managed, "about how many weeks you're going to have to work for Dreilide Thrace if you want to marry Kara."

Lee frowned. There was an old custom that bridegrooms had to work for their parents-in-law for the number of weeks that their courtship lasted in months. It had been meant, in other centuries, to dissuade young lovers from courting behind their parents' backs.

The familiar ache at the pit of his stomach, a kind of urgent burning that sometimes sputtered but never went away, flared for a moment, thinking about all of that. It was too far away, looked too much like the kind of future he and Kara had long since agreed they wouldn't hope for.

"Marry Kara Thrace, and her dad's gonna be the least of your problems," he deflected. Gods, but Lee didn't want to talk about Kara—about his feelings for Kara—with anyone, even Helo. It was like sitting near a teacher watching them grade an essay you'd written. .

"Wonder how much I'd owe John Cavil, if I ran into him," Helo mused under his breath, his mirth gone as suddenly as it had come.

"He's not Sharon's father," Lee said flatly. "And she's not a killer. It's a trick. She's the victim of a genetic trick."

"They both are," said Karl, and Lee knew he meant Kara, too. "And so are we."

Now Lee started to laugh as the whole insanity of the situation dawned on him. "Lords, it's all we need. Kara's got a _twin_."

"Four of 'em, actually." Helo grunted a laugh. "Might be doing the worlds a favor to leave 'em buried."

"Exactly what I was thinking."

But he was really thinking about what the frak he was going to do if those Sevens were dead. _They have to be alive. They have to know how one of them came for Kara and Leoben and the Horn, on top of that temple.  
><em>  
>Otherwise he'd be looking for her for the rest of his life.<p> 


	19. Contact

**Chapter 18: Contact**

**Word Count: ~2,400**

**Rating: ** PG-13

**A/N: **This is my favorite chapter in a while. (It's been pretty grim, hasn't it?) Also, huge thanks to everyone who's commented—I never realized how much it really makes a huge difference in writing when you feel like you're talking to someone. Y'all have been great someones.

* * *

><p>"How long before we can make contact?" Olivia wiped the sweat off her brow with a cloth that had probably been clean, this morning. The odd jet streams around Caprica had ensured that the continent, six years on, wasn't experiencing a nuclear winter, but a perpetual nuclear summer.<p>

Neither she nor the Chief was sure whether the sweat was sun or radiation-induced, or whether the radiation injections worked as well for them as for humans. She wore the radiation suit—more like a leotard—around her major organs, and a helmet on her head. Those things were more like superstition than protection. And took comfort from the fact that the humans, Helo and Apollo, were sweating, too.

"Another three weeks, at least. We're only just over halfway down. Obviously, it'd be easier if there were more of us." He handed her his water bottle and, without thinking about it, moved between her and the sun, to block some of it with his body.

She noticed, but determined not to read too much into it. "If it weren't for the Centurions…"

He nodded. "Exactly. It'd be months."

That the Centurions were willing to follow his orders surprised him. Olivia could tell. Galen Tyrol was still a man growing into his own authority, still probing cautiously into the pockets of scientific and mechanical knowledge that had been encrypted in his brain for decades. He was finding his new self. That was why she didn't pay much attention to the way he looked at her, these days.

It wasn't a man looking at her. It was a liminal being, between three points on a triangle: the humanoid Cylon who'd come to Caprica, the deck chief who'd been Sharon Valerii's lover and Cally Henderson's husband, and the man he was about to become. Just a being undergoing metamorphosis.

God, but she was beginning to want that liminal man, though.

Olivia stepped out of his shadow and hoisted herself back up into the backhoe she'd been operating. There was no silly temptation in digging. Just dirt. Plain, straightforward, irradiated Caprican dirt.

Galen leaned into the side of her machine before she turned it back on, seeming not to want to let her go yet. _Temptation. _He nodded, now, in Lee Adama's direction. Lee was drilling communication wire into the ground, so they could find out if anyone was down there sooner rather than later. He was working alone, methodically. He took breaks half as often as the rest of them, showed up earlier than they did, left only when darkness made progress prohibitive. He was driven. "Where do you think he goes at night?"

"I asked him." Olivia shrugged. "He says he goes home. His mom's place, where he grew up. That the rats aren't too bad, out a few miles into the country."

Galen shook his head. "Poor bastard," he muttered. He hopped down. "Alright. Back to work."

_Back to work. _Boomer's memories flowed over her, suddenly. He was the deck chief, again.

And she was, any way she played it, a traitor.

She went back to work.

* * *

><p>Lee was hungry and tired in a way that he hadn't been since <em>Galactica<em> had crashed into Earth. There was a way in which it felt good to work all hours again, to be keenly aware of his own prospects for survival. The feeling felt like home.

Cap City been at the center of more than one nuclear blast. The Petra lab, well north of the center city, had immediately felt the effects of fallout, and of the systematic hunt that the Cylons had undertaken to weed out survivors. Lee wouldn't have wanted to try to go downtown; the burnt-out rubble, the stench of the tens of thousands of corpses buried there… Even here, rodents were thriving, and occasionally larger game wandered down from the Corinthian Forest, which they'd been shocked to see from space was still green.

Caprica was uninhabitable, but not for everything that had once lived here: a fraction of what had been, remained. Mostly, there was death everywhere, and where you couldn't _see_ death, the stench of it.

And that was what Lee was thinking when he cut the lock to Pyrrh's River Cemetery—that death was a comfort here. The lock was strange, though. It had been midday when Caprica was attacked. Strange that no one had unlocked this gate before it happened.

He was surprised not to have the constant feeling that he was being watched by the millions of invisible dead. It actually wasn't frightening, this place. He knew the planet was empty, down to his bones. When he'd first opened the door to his mother's house, no part of him had expected her to be home.

That was a kind of peace.

He made his way to the corner of the field with the elongated square tombstones, reserved for military veterans killed in action. "Zak," he muttered to himself, "I'm sorry it took me so long to get here."

In fact, Lee hadn't been back to visit Zak's grave since the funeral. He'd stood across his brother's coffin from Kara, right here. That day, he'd thought he'd never see her again. Part of him had never _wanted_ to see her again. This grave, Zak's body—there'd been no possibility of recovering from their betrayal, from what it told him about himself. He hadn't wanted to face what a terrible person, brother, friend, that Kara Thrace had shown him he was. He hadn't wanted to see himself as he knew she must see him.

Gods, but he'd been young then.

He remembered that his father had shown him a picture of this grave only a few weeks before, reminding him of the poem on it. That poem had meant less to him, then. _And when you sing anew, although you mourn / I am the cry of Cronus's horn…_

He shoved his hands in his pockets as he rounded the corner to what he thought was the right row, steeling himself for the onslaught of this place.

He was thinking that it would have been easier if Zak had died in the genocide. At least that way, his death wouldn't be so… singular.

Then he saw it.

"Gods." Lee glanced up to the heavens, half expecting to see Kara's viper strafing the cemetery. "You've gotta be frakking _kidding me_." He looked around in every direction, suddenly sure someone was watching him. _This is what people mean when they say they feel someone walking on their grave. I feel—gods, the irony—I feel lost in time._

He made himself approach it, even though his instinct was to turn and run. Made himself bend and pick it up.

There, leaning against his tombstone like a ceremonial wreath, was the godsdamned Horn of Cronus. In its spout, a note, folded in plastic.

Kara's handwriting.

He shuddered.

_Don't blow me yet_.

His hands were shaking. But he smirked at the line. And if _that_ wasn't a vintage Starbuck experience…

He sat down on the ground and leaned against his brother's headstone and wrapped his arms around the Horn.

_She'd been here_.

He was on track. She was somewhere. He was going to find her.

Lee was glad there were so few other people on the planet when he put his head between his knees and gasped for air.

* * *

><p>Gaius Baltar always landed on his feet. Now, as chief resource advisor to the president of the colonies, who'd taken up residence in the impressive house that had been seized from Bill Adama when he'd been arrested, was no exception.<p>

His wife, however, was. One of the Cylon rebels, she hadn't landed on her feet so much as beneath his, in hiding in the cellar. Any second, his son would start crying, and the president and her staff…

"No, no, I agree he should be charged, Madame President." Gaius Baltar tried to contain his dread. "It's only that I'm not sure that _treason_ is quite—"

"You think that interfering with a fair election, holding me hostage, conspiring with the rebels who abandoned the colony—that all that can be described any other way? Dr. Baltar, I assure you—William Adama is guilty of treason."

Gaius swallowed. He'd once been on the wrong end of a treason charge. They had stopped calling him "doctor" in those days, just as they were no longer referring to the admiral by any military title at all.

Just as well, since there was no military left here, to speak of. It was gone, gone with much of the colony's working class, and all the Cylons.

All except Caprica.

"It's only that I'm not sure that there are any rebel forces left to quell, Madame President," he submitted more quietly.

She raised a brow. "There'd better not be, Dr. Baltar. If I find that you've maintained communication with—"

"I can assure you that I haven't." Not that he hadn't been trying, for several weeks, to contact the missing rebels. Desperately.

He had contacted someone though. There were at least a handful of allies in hiding inside _Galactica_. President Porter's government had cut a hole in the hull on the same day the rebels had escaped and begun systematically stripping the place, but so far they hadn't found the Tighs or Kara Thrace.

"You _will_ contact them, though. They can't be allowed to escape."

He swallowed. "I'll make every effort, Madame President," he said sincerely. He thought he heard a keening cry beneath his feet, but it was clear it was in his head. No one else reacted. "Anything else, Madame?"

She squinted at him, as if trying to peer inside. Many had tried. She failed, and turned away without a word, her advisors on her heels.

Gaius Baltar sank onto Bill Adama's armchair and tried to muster the courage to call for his wife.

* * *

><p>When the communicator drill made it through the second wall of the bunker, Helo read it on the gauge in front of him more than felt it.<p>

"We're go for contact," Helo signaled the Chief, who was standing by with the radio in hand.

"Attention, residents of the Petra Laboratory." Helo saw the Chief swallow, imagined he was considering whether or not to tell them that Galen Tyrol had returned, wondering how much of a lie that would be. "We are a… rescue team come to oversee your evacuation. Please advise as to how many souls are in the bunker and what medical attention is needed."

There was a long burst of static, and then a short silence, before a thin, male voice came over the radio in the Chief's hand. Helo heard it in his knees.

"…Petra here… thirty-seven souls. No shortage of medical supplies. Rescue, could you please tell us whether a Major Lee Adama is with you?"

Helo saw the Chief's jaw drop open, and knew the expression was mirrored on his own face. "Major Adama is currently off-site," he managed. _How did they know…?_

"Tell him we have his orders." The Chief was staring at the wireless set, frowning at it fiercely, swallowing hard. The voice on the other end grew impatient. "Rescue, do you copy?"

"Copy that." The Chief paused. "Copy that, _Gabriel_."

"Dr. Tyrol." There was a brief crackle on the line, and then what sounded like a short laugh. "It's about time. Mind telling us how long before you get us out of here?"

* * *

><p>Lee was lying on his back on the couch in his mother's house—the couch smelled musty, now, and he guessed it would forever—when he heard the beep of his long-range wireless. It was four a.m. He knew he should be on his feet and marching down to Petra, but somehow laying here with Kara's note in his hands and the Horn on the floor beside him had taken all the energy he had.<p>

He picked up the handset. "Apollo here," he said.

"Apollo, it's Helo. We need you on-site ASAP."

"Roger that. Can I get a sitrep?"

"You can. We've made contact with the bunker. There are…" The radio crackled, and Lee lost a few words. "…people down there." A long pause. "And Apollo—they're… they're asking for _you_."

The hand holding the note went cold. "I'm on my way."

He slid the Horn into a canvas bag, and the note into the knee pocket of his fatigues. He looked around his mother's house, its furniture that would rot here, its plates and forks that would sink into the soil and stay there for a thousand years. Should he take anything with him? Would it make it easier to go?

_No._ He'd made it this far without any of it.

He was out the door before he knew he couldn't resist the chance to carry something away, even if it was something that had been gone long before it had been irradiated, and something he was carrying already, in any case.

He ventured down into the permanent darkness of the den by memory, ripped an old family photograph off the side table, where it had sat since shortly after it was taken, in another universe populated so differently from this one he wasn't sure, just now, that it wasn't a dream. There it was. The four of them, on the beach at Persepolis, Zak yelling from his dad's shoulder's, Lee building sand towns at his mother's feet. They were all smiling. He didn't remember that day, but he remembered the photograph. Remembered wondering why his mother had left it there, so long after the divorce.

It went in the pocket of the bag, near the Horn.

On the front walk, in his haste, he tripped over one of the stepping stones that had come dislodged in the last few years, probably by the weather. "Godsdamnit! What the frak is that _doing_—"

And before he could think about why, it was in his hands, and he picked it up, and he heaved it straight through the bay window spreading across the front of the house, and felt something break in him with the familiar sound of shattered glass. And he stalked away without looking back.

He was strangely relieved to think that, actually, he'd never have to go back there again.


	20. Orders

Chapter 19: Orders**  
><strong>In the Whole World (WIP)  
><strong>Rating<strong>: NC-17  
>Word Count: ~2,000<p>

**Flashback. At the Farm. More than four years ago.**

_The Four shook his head as he made the incision in the blond woman's abdomen. "Remember, we're keeping this offline," he said to the man standing across from him. "If the Ones found out that we were using her for experimentation instead of gestation…"_

"_They won't." The man who thought of himself as Leoben Conoy—though individual names were prohibited by conventions stronger than law—crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back against the wall of the surgical chamber. "Just keep her separate from the other subjects."_

"_You really think you can use her ova to revive Daniel?" The Four frowned in concentration under his surgical mask, leaning closer to the opening he'd made in her flesh. "Maybe if the Final Five were…" his brain skittered away from the word _alive_. "John's the only one of us who's successfully reencoded DNA. And even then, you know as well as I that there's something strange about how he built the Eights…" The Four picked up a cauterizing wand and separated some of the connective tissue from the ovary. _

_Conoy watched impassively. "I already have the alternative coding. And access to the Sevens' memory banks."_

_The Four's brow shot up. "How?"  
><em>

"_We don't _just die_._"_ One side of Conoy's mouth lifted in half a smile, at that. "God knows I've tried," he added, so quietly that the Four almost didn't hear it._

_The Four knew he shouldn't have gotten involved in this business, but his pity had gotten the better of him. Anyone could see that there was a demon dogging the Twos, and he suspected it would hound them until they'd finally made up for betraying the Sevens. _

_Especially this one. This one, this First Two, who had defied all the Cylon precepts against personal, individual connections when he married the First Seven. Leoben had made promises to Daniel and God. He'd been studying the means of reversing the river of time ever since he'd broken his promise. The Four's shoulders tensed, just to think of it. "How long 'til they notice we're offline?" was all he asked._

_Leoben shrugged. "Some already have. It's a question of what their suspicions are." His mouth lifted again, that peculiar expression that seemed to both see things from God's own view and laugh at the whole of creation. "I'd say you have ten minutes before anyone comes looking for you."_

_The woman—Kara Thrace, that's what the Two had called her—twitched violently. She was dreaming of herself as a young girl, going to visit her father at work; the men and women there were her brothers and sisters, and she was going to be a scientist like them, when she grew up._

_The Four made his cut across her fallopian tube knowing he had less than ten minutes before she came out of anesthesia, changed his mind, and increased her dose. "Godspeed to you, Leoben," he said as he slid the woman's ovary into a cooling unit and handed it to the man._

_He knew he'd crossed every line there was when he heard himself use the Two's name aloud. Deep down, he'd known—even when he'd first agreed to the surgery—that he was doing it in part because Conoy called _him _by name, too. Simon O'Neill._

_Simon kept wrapping that name around himself like a blanket. It made him feel like someone._

"_If all goes well, I won't need it," Leoben said. "I'll have all the time in the world."_

* * *

><p>Lee had written down Gabriel's explanation of his "orders". It was easier to have them written down.<p>

_You and Kara Thrace made contact with us over a year ago. You said that when you reappeared—about now—we should tell you to go figure out why her Viper exploded. We weren't sure you'd believe us, Major. But Kara said, just tell him it's an order, he loves following orders. And you said, tell me that's what Kara said, and I'll believe you._

So those were his orders. He pictured himself writing up a report of _this_ mission, and almost laughed. His father would laugh, reading it.

The smile slid from his face when he remembered the fate to which he'd abandoned his father.

He'd begun packing for his trip. He was taking one of the Raptors; it was all that could be spared from the rescue effort. Luckily, there was no shortage of tylium, here. He'd loaded enough that he could get to the gas planet and back to Caprica six times over.

With little other cargo, it wasn't a problem. Just him, Kara's notebooks, some food, the frakking Horn of Cronus.

He didn't want to go back. He'd thought about where he might go, before this mission to Caprica had arisen. He'd thought that he might taken the Horn back to the site where Kara's Viper had wrecked, on the Cylon Earth. He hadn't wanted to go there.

But he wanted to go back to the place where she'd lost her mind, and then apparently her life, even less.

Now he was ready to go, and Olivia, the Chief, and Helo had gathered for farewells.

"Come back as soon as you can," the Chief said worriedly. "I don't think solitary missions are a very good idea at this point. We can't come after you."

Lee nodded. He was about to be like Kara—just another person who no one had any idea how to find.

That, at least, was comforting. "I'll be back as soon as possible. If I'm not back here in three weeks, we'll rendezvous back at Earth."

Helo gaze became a warning one. "But you don't have powerful enough communication devices to find the new rebel colony—"

"Then you'll have to get word to me at the old colony."

"Are you insane?" This was Olivia. "They'll put you straight to death. Right on top of your father. And then his sacrifice will be for nothing."

Lee shook his head. How could he tell them that he expected to have Kara with him—to have some kind of insane, Starbuck-fueled plan? "We're borrowing trouble," he said instead. "I'll try to meet you back here. Jumping to the gas planet, a quick investigation—it should only take a few days."

"Don't forget to sleep." Helo again.

"I won't." Lee clapped him on the back. "Listen, if I don't make it back—"

"Shut up," the Chief said. "There are rules about that kind of talk."

"I'm just gonna say this once," Lee managed. "Now that we found Earth—I'd like to have a grave. I never liked the idea of being buried in space. Even if you don't have my body. Just—some kind of final resting place."

"Seriously, Apollo, you're crossing—"

"I'll make sure of it," Olivia broke in. Helo nodded, too. "You got it, buddy."

"Right." He ducked into the Raptor, but then remembered one more thing. "Same goes for Kara's dad. When you finally get into Petra—"

This time, the Chief nodded. "We'll bring her dad home, Lee." His tone was bleak, as it had been ever since they'd found out how narrowly he'd missed a reunion with his old friend. A matter of months.

Lee closed the Raptor door, double-checked the first set of coordinates on the list that the Chief had helped him plot. He'd left Kara's notebook open to a page where she'd written down on of Hybrid Sam's ramblings that now seemed prescient and comforting: _The arrow will guide him so he goes where he almost went. He will step through the doorway of the years and sacrifice a heart of fire to the cause of life._

Atop his Raptor, the Chief had affixed the Arrow of Apollo like a weathervane, and Lee knew without checking that it was pointed straight into the maelstrom.

* * *

><p>They'd set the <em>Hitei Kan <em>down on a patch of land they'd be fools to try to live on. The land was half desert, the nearby sea was half salt. And Sharon didn't think they were far enough away from the colony they'd abandoned; they were only at the northern edge of the same continent.

She wanted to be somewhere where Sarah Porter couldn't find her on _foot_.

But she was badly outnumbered. Here, in the tent that had become dubbed the CIC, a declaration was being hammered out.

"There needs to be a clause about how they stole our weapons," Seelix objected. She sounded patient, like she was haggling over a divorce settlement and not crafting a declaration of war. "And it needs to go ahead of all the stuff about the Cylons."

"The 'stuff about the Cylons,'" interjected a Two called Caleb Callahan, "is the reason why we evacuated in the first place. We can't just shove it under the—"

"I don't think we even need a declaration of war in the first place," Hex cut in. "It's not like the Colonial Conventions on military conduct apply. We are the military. We make military law."

"That's reasoning that's no better than hers!" Cal threw up his hands in frustration. "If we're going to get sympathy from any of the humans who are left behind—"

"We don't need _sympathy_. We need tactics. And guns. And all the metal and crops and _infrastructure_ that's rightfully ours, that we left behind."

"Rightfully ours," Sharon repeated, trying to keep her dubiousness out of her voice. But Hex heard it.

"Damn straight. We saved the fleet. We lost friends doing it. And _we _frakking found Earth! Why should _they _get all the privileges when they had none of the responsibilities?"

Sharon sighed. They'd been around this block a hundred times. Hex and his friends persisted in believing that the civilians in the fleet had been having one long garden party while _Galactica_ had been, alone, at war.

She was long past thinking she could talk them out of it. It had been the overwhelming outcome of the vote that Hoshi had administered weeks before. People wanted to settle… at the old settlement. In less than a year, it had become home. Theirs.

And now they would go to war for it.

_Again_. Permanent war.

She missed Karl a hell of a lot, tonight. Sometimes she'd forgotten about war, when he was around.

* * *

><p>Bill Adama shadow-boxed in his cell. He'd done his push-ups, sit-ups, lunges; he'd jogged the cell's perimeter for much of the afternoon. He'd made another of his daily requests for reading material about half an hour ago, only to receive yet another copy of the Scrolls of Pythia.<p>

_Some joke, Madame President._

He could have borne the delay of his trial if he'd thought it changed the odds in his favor. But he could hear the unrest outside, the battle cries and gunfire that meant skirmishes were ongoing. Sarah Porter had domestic conflict on her hands. She needed a scapegoat. She needed his head on a platter.

The only reason she'd put off his trial was that she hadn't found a way of ensuring she'd win it, yet.

He spun, his fist flailing out instinctively, as his door swung open. The young guard ducked.

"Hold out your arms, Admiral," the guard said gruffly. She cuffed him. "We've secured your precious battlestar. We're transferring you to the brig on _Galactica_."

Bill almost smiled.

So there was hope yet.


	21. Between Life and Death

"Looks like the medical ward's ready." Here, what might be days or hours before invasion, Sharon's objections to assaulting the civilian colony had been so thoroughly overruled that she'd been relegated to oversight of the medical division, kept as far away from the control room and front line strategy as possible.

"Ready as it can be," Doc Cottle blew out the words with a puff of cigar smoke.

"I wish I could be as resigned as you are."

The doc raised a thick eyebrow. "Sweetheart, this isn't my first damn fool war. Just my first one in a long time." He scanned a piece of paper that a nearby medic, bustling by, shoved into his hands, scrawled a hasty signature on it, and then turned back to Athena. "How long before it's zero hour?"

She shrugged. "High command's not saying. Two days at the outside before we move, I'd guess. Then it's just the march down. They'll want us to sneak up, surprise them. So maybe a week until all hell breaks loose."

Cottle sighed, then nodded. "War," he shook his head. "Just an addiction like any other."

"What's the cure?"

"Same cure as for all of our worst instincts." The cigar was between his teeth now. "Babies."

Sharon thought of Hera, of the explanations that she'd been having to make lately about what they were doing and why, of how easily, actually, Hera seemed to accept it. "Yeah, well, I don't think we can get enough of those in time."

"No," said the doc, "don't suppose we can. I've been working on bandages and anesthesia instead. If you'll excuse me," he patted her shoulder, "I'll get back to it."

Left alone with gurneys, Sharon resisted her urge to throw herself down on one of them and pound it into submission. She'd thought they were escaping; she'd believed it when they'd gotten aboard the _Hitei Kan, _that they'd be starting again, doing it right this time.

She should have figured out by now that there was no such frakking thing as a fresh start. Just one war after another, that was all they were good for, now.

* * *

><p>"Mr. Adama, I'll ask you one more time. By your own admission, you'd voluntarily retired from the armed services well before the day that you kidnapped the president—"<p>

"She wasn't the president at the time."

"—while your son was losing an election to her. You had no military directive, as you weren't part of the military in any official capacity. So what _exactly_ was your position?"

Bill Adama sighed. Perhaps it was time to make a show of cooperating, stop answering sarcastically. He had the bad feeling, though, that the moment he began taking this show trial seriously, would be the moment they wrapped it up, found him guilty, and hanged him. So be it. He spoke to the judge asking the question, who was sitting in the same spot that Bill himself had sat in, when they'd tried Gaius Baltar for treason. He didn't have his son's whole-body conscience here to remind everyone of their humanity. All he had was bluntness and the poor virtues he'd cultivated in decades of military life.

"I acted in my capacity as a civilian. My intention was to prevent Ms. Porter," he elected not to use her title as the people trying him hadn't seen fit to use his, "from immediately rounding up all the Cylon citizens and ordering them to undergo what she was calling memory therapy. I believed that that order would lead to civil war, which might be prevented if we had more time for negotiation." It had turned out that it didn't even take the order—just the sure knowledge that one was coming, but Bill Adama let his silence say that part. "My experience has left me with a sense of duty, I'm afraid. I've seen zealotry lead to war before."

"So you weren't attempting a coup on your son's behalf?"

"Lee would never accept a presidency that he thought had been obtained by thwarting the popular will. Even if his democratically elected president had a blood grudge against a large chunk of the populace. He's not made that way."

"But you admit that you helped your son escape."

"People have a right to a government that represents and protects them."

"Governments have a right to prosecute criminals, and your son—"

Bill turned to his state-provided attorney, a man named Chase Goering, and asked—not for the first time in this mockery of a trial—"Are you going to object that this proceeding is prosecuting my son in absentia? No? Alright, carry on, then."

The prosecutor flushed, but he carried on.

Bill went back to answering with half his brain, the angry half. The rest of him was reaching for the note in his pocket, the one that had come through the air vent in his cell the very day he'd been transferred to _Galactica_. Written in an old code from the First Cylon War, in a distinctive scrawl he'd know anywhere as belonging to Saul Tigh. _We're here with Kara / must move each day to maintain our cover / we'll get you out / our girl's working on a plan / hold on, old man, we have your six._

He hadn't come to terms with how much hope he'd been holding onto until the tears had come to his eyes, on seeing it. _Hold on, Laura. Looks like I'm not coming to you just yet._

Here he was, wondering what the frak was taking Saul and Kara so long, imagining every creak of the ship was them scuttling around in the hidden vents and back chambers, hoping that this mockery of a trial wouldn't end in a sudden bullet to his brain against the hull of _Galactica_ before they could come to him, before Starbuck's insane miraculous strategy, whatever it was, could have its day.

For the first time in a while, Bill Adama realized that he very much wanted to live.

* * *

><p>Olivia wasn't surprised that Galen broke like an egg against a metal bowl. When he, Helo, and Olivia first set foot inside Petra, the Chief had barely taken a step before stumbling to the ground, as if in pain. "<em>Oh, God<em>," he whispered, "God. Oh, God." He clutched his temple, and Olivia figured it was probably the memories. Her was embarrassed for him; he had so much pride. This wasn't the time.

The thirty-eight pale faces that hadn't seen the sun in two decades—and some of them weren't that old, had only ever been exposed to their UV lamps—had swarmed in on them. Some of them were crying, holding each other. Some of them just stared, looking fragile, as breakable as the Chief. Two of the Sevens blanched at the sight of her. She supposed they hadn't seen an Eight since one had killed off a couple of them twenty years ago. She tried to look comforting, but it had never been one of her strengths.

Olivia looked at Helo, saw him fighting back his own tears, to see these poor people. So it would have to be her. "Hello," she said gently; she was trying to be gentle, anyway. "We're the people you've been talking to for the last few days. We've come to take you to the surface. And then to take you home, to Earth."

Then one of the Sevens walked over to her. "Swear that you mean us no harm," he demanded.

She didn't hesitate, had never meant anything more: "I've done harm in my life. I regret it all. I mean you no harm, I swear it."

He nodded. Then he knelt down beside the Chief, put an arm over his shoulder. "Dr. Tyrol," he said in a low voice, "you made it back, after all."

Galen Tyrol drew in a choky breath. "I guess I did, Gabriel."

"Wait until I show you some of the things I built… you'll be so proud." Galen's head hung low, at that, stayed low as he pulled him to his feet.

"I can't wait," he said, and pulled an arm around Gabriel, hard, letting his head fall to the other man's shoulder for a moment.

"One of them's my daughter," Gabriel said easily.

There was a woman in the corner, standing with a child of about eleven. Sharon let out a gasp. _Another hybrid. Hera wasn't alone_.

The woman squeezed the child's shoulder. "We're going to go up to the surface, Charlie," she said, "see the sun and the wind you're always projecting off to. But this time, for real." The girl buried her face in her mother's shoulder, for a moment, as if trying to make it dark enough to get there, right now, in her mind.

The Chief swallowed, looking at them. "We'll need a few days to transfer all of your equipment up to the _Greenleaf_," he said finally. "Everyone can come up to the surface to—to see it. But it's safest to sleep down here, protected from the radiation."

Gabriel let out a breath. "Just a few more days in prison. Funny, how unbearable that seems now that it's so close to being over." He looked at the shaft they'd dug down, for the elevator they'd built, which the Centurions would use to pull them up and down. "Any word from Daniel?"

The Chief raised an eyebrow, and Sharon felt a chill shoot down her spine. "When was the last you heard from him?" the Chief asked.

"When?" Gabriel laughed. "With Daniel, that's always the hardest thing to figure. Every once in a while, our memories shift, and we realize he's downloaded to a new body again. But he always does it at the same moment, about two years ago."

"What… what are you saying?" the Chief asked. "How many times has it happened?"

Gabriel looked at one of his fellow Sevens. "What would you say, Zeke?"

"In excess of seventy-five hundred times," Zeke said flatly.

"What the frak has he been doing?" Helo breathed.

"He's been running time experiments. Different ones, over and over. Trying to find a way to save you all. Stop the Cylon genocide. When that didn't work, get all of you—Kara and all of you final five onto _Galactica_—and then find a way for you all to find Earth."

The Chief let out a bark of laughter. "Daniel. God. Of course he has." He shook his head. He shook his head. "Why didn't _he_ come back for you?"

Gabriel shrugged. "He has. Many times." He lowered his voice. "It's worse for us—for the Sevens—because we remember all of it. For the others… they forget when Daniel abandons a particular time stream…" He sighed. "It always ended in disaster, before, and Daniel gave up; God didn't want him to save us, he decided. But we've never seen _you_, so maybe this time…"

"But you _have _seen Lee, and Kara?"

Gabriel's face dimmed at the mention of his sister. "Yes, but there's something strange about it, Galen. Something I can't quite remember, somehow…" He looked at Zeke for guidance.

"It was a year ago for us, but Lee hasn't been here yet," Zeke said flatly. "It's interfering with our memories. He might not make it back from the maelstrom. The things which have happened might yet not happen."

"That's impossible—it's the most elementary kind of paradox. It's the reason we abandoned the time travel experiments in the first place," the Chief spluttered. "It would tear the fabric of the universe."

"The fabric's already torn," Zeke said. He'd never been one for blunting hard facts. "That's how this is possible. It's where Lee is going."

Gabriel looked at his wife, whose eyes met his over their daughter's head with the psychic speed of long familiarity. "Godspeed," she murmured.

Olivia let go of the bravado she'd been holding onto. "Godspeed," she echoed, and no one but Gabriel heard it. He smiled.

* * *

><p>It hadn't taken Lee long to get back to the site of the storm—what they'd thought was a storm—that had swallowed Kara whole, two years before. He'd been sitting here, eyeing it broodingly for almost as long as he'd been in flight from Caprica. He could hear Kara's voice in his head, mocking his hesitation. That was part of the problem.<p>

Kara had died, here. Hadn't she? It wasn't that Lee was afraid to die, here, too, exactly. It was just that his theology was wrestling with the implications of death. Would he see Kara again, or ought he have written her some kind of note, back on Caprica? There was nothing he could leave here, nothing that anyone would ever find. Maybe he ought to go back to Earth, carve her a note in the wall of their house… Was anyone on the other side? Would Zak be there? Gianne, his child? All his friends from home? His father, whom he'd abandoned to an inevitable mockery of a trial that would surely end in execution, probably already had? Was Dee there? His mother? Was there anything there?

OK, so he was afraid.

_You've been here before, Apollo. The only thing that stopped you from following her _that _time was your dad. Now he's gone, too. Nothing left to lose._

Except his life. Except his last hopes of getting back home, of having the bright frakking shiny future he'd scorned for as long as he ever bothered to remember, anymore. Except his million questions about what a godsdamned hunk of horn-shaped metal was going to do in that storm that Starbuck's Viper couldn't do. How would it stop him from exploding, burning up in outer space, staying here forever?

He took a breath. He was bored with indecision. He had nowhere else to look to find home, anyway. This was where she'd disappeared, where the people in Petra had told him to find her.

_No, Dad. It's no use. Her ship's in pieces. Her ship's in pieces. No chute. We lost her…_

_Just let me go, Lee. They're waiting for me… I'll see you on the other side_.

The other side. Lee grabbed the stick and turned the Raptor around, let his eyes trace the maelstrom's swirl.

It was now or never. He'd see her there or he wouldn't.

Lee filled the cabin of the Raptor with oxygen so that he could take off his helmet. He activated his thrusters, aimed toward the vital, swirling center of a storm that hadn't dissipated in years, probably wouldn't for millennia, judging by its size. He grabbed the controls with one arm, and _dove_, lifting the Horn of Cronus to his mouth as the pressure built and built past what he thought he could bear. The sound of pressure building was so loud, on the brink of explosion, that he didn't hear the Horn as he poured all the air left in his lungs into it.

He hadn't practiced, was sure this was the sort of instrument with which you _really_ shouldn't practice.

When he blew the Horn, there wasn't so much as a ripple, but Lee was suddenly standing in a room—a familiar room, a room on Caprica. The smoothest landing of his life, and he was renowned for his landings.

He drew in a breath. He knew where he was. He spun for the door. He couldn't be here—in his old apartment in C City, in a part of town he knew was now rubble? With the light and the electricity and the smell all telling him the worlds hadn't ended yet, that there was still time, here.

And there was someone else here who couldn't be here, but was.

"Laura," he breathed. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Oh, Lee." Laura Roslin's eyes were full; she looked like she was brimming over with pride as she reached out to touch his cheek. "You made it.

"Where are we?"

"We're in the doorway, Lee." She smiled, almost beaming. "Between life and death."

"Frak," he breathed. "Kara told me about this—Leoben took her to see her mother…" He frowned. "You're… you're my Leoben."

"Not how I would put it, Major. But yes, I volunteered to be your guide here." She smiled. "Now do what Kara didn't do. The thing you're good at." She raised a brow. "Ask the right question."

He squared his jaw. "Whose life? Whose death?"

She smiled again. "Not yours, Lee. Just like Kara was never trapped in hers, but in between the life and death of Socrata Thrace." She shuddered lightly, one mother horrified by the parenting of another.

"And me?"

"Whose do you think?" Lee squeezed his eyes shut. He'd left so many people for dead, but he knew. "Zak," he whispered. He opened his eyes.

"Hey, bro," said his brother from the couch. "We watching the game or what?"


	22. Winning

"We watching the game or what?" his brother said, and Lee drew in his breath to hear Zak's voice slash straight across the years. It slashed, and then it echoed.

It echoed because he'd been here before.

When Kara had told him about what she'd seen, when she'd sunk into the maelstrom, he'd assumed it was a hallucination. A second chance with her mother—Leoben Conoy as her spiritual guide?

But here he was, and it felt very real.

He followed Zak's gaze to see himself coming through the door.

"Sorry I'm late," the younger Lee said. His voice sounded muffled. He looked grim. Standing beside Laura, Lee recognized this moment from the expression on his younger self's face. He had a surge of pity for the young man he'd been. He was so grim and resolute and, gods, why couldn't Zak see how _scared _he was? Did his brother notice _anything_ outside of his own problems?

With the ease that followed years of discipline, Lee quashed that disloyal thought. He turned to look at Laura, shook his head. "Not this. I'm not watching this. Let's go."

"You don't get to choose what you need, Lee." Laura tucked a hand in his arm. "You remember this, then?"

His breath came through his clenched teeth. "Yes."

"You were stationed at Delphi that whole spring and summer. You'd met Kara six months before." Her voice got sterner, and he winced. "You'd been having an affair for five of them."

He looked at her a long moment, watched his younger self shrug off a jacket, go to the fridge to get a cold beer. And accepted the inevitable. "Yeah. I was going to tell him. I was about to ship out, and I'd decided I didn't care what Kara said. I couldn't…" Lee ran a hand along his jaw, remembering the feeling of Kara's fist connecting with it when he'd told her he was going to confess everything to Zak. The younger man in front of him could feel it as more than a memory. "I thought I couldn't live with it anymore. And that when it came out, Kara would _have _to live with it…"

"That's not how it happened."

"I overestimated myself."

"You underestimated your brother." He made to step away from her, from the whole ugly scene, but she grabbed his arm. "Come on, now, Major. And pay attention, this time."

It wasn't riveting. For a long while, the two brothers simply sat silently beside each other on the couch, sipping beer. The only sound they could hear was the soft voice of the announcer from the set in front of them. Lee could hardly breathe, the past was so thick, here: "_The rookie, Sam Anders, takes the court for the Bucs. Anders is one of four on his last two excursions…_" the announcer intoned.

Neither brother seemed engrossed in the game. Lee kept glancing up at the wall over the set; Zak kept picking up his beer and reading the label as though it contained some kind of secret.

Lee steeled himself when he saw the young Lee set his shoulders. "Zak," he said, "we need to talk."

From this angle, Lee saw Zak's grimace, but when Zak turned to his younger self, his expression was all earnestness. "Yeah. We do." His little brother looked down at the sofa. "You know, don't you?"

"I… what?"

"About Kara." Zak scowled. "That she's cheating on me." He tossed back the rest of the bottle. He seemed oddly nervous. "You're down at the flight school all the time. You must have seen something—just tell me."

"Gods. Yes, she's…" Lee cleared a throat choked up with fateful fear, and—then let Zak cut him off.

"You must have seen something! Come _on_, think about it. I'm going crazy, man, like—like I keep thinking I can smell other people on her. Crazy stuff."

"Look." Lee gripped his knees to still his hands, and, watching himself, saw Zak's eyes flicker there, and quickly away. "If she's cheating on you, it's…"

"There's evidence, too. I never know where she is, and when I ask, she fobs me off with the vaguest frakking answers. And she's different in bed, too. I mean, she still can't get enough of me, but it's like, less _fun_ than it used to be—"

"Gods _damn_..." Lee's knuckles were white. "I mean… if you're right," he finished lamely.

"And the other thing is that she cries—can you even imagine, Kara crying—afterward, you know? I'm not supposed to notice because she makes some dirty joke or tells me that she's doing it because it just _means too much_, but…" Zak leaned forward now, as if something had just occurred to him. "Do you think she could be… pregnant?"

The young Lee actually shuddered at that, and watching, Lee was thinking, _gods, how does he not see me? How does he not notice that he's torturing me?_

But Zak did notice, if only out of the corner of his eye. "Look, I know you're not exactly her biggest fan."

"That's not true—"

"I just… I'm in love with her, Lee." Zak's voice became almost pleading. "It's not like with Maggie, you know, where it was just about the sex." Zak flung himself backwards. "I didn't even care when Maggie fell for you at War College. It made the ending easier, you know?" The younger Lee grimaced guiltily at that what a strain Maggie's pursuit of him had put on his relationship with his brother. "But Kara… I don't know what I'd do without her. It's like she makes me believe I can be the person that I'm supposed to be."

"She pretty much _is_ the person who _Dad_ wants you to be," Lee said quietly.

Zak rolled his shoulders around uncomfortably. "Not this again. It's not like that."

"Isn't it?" Lee shook his head. "You're fooling yourself. You don't love Kara. She's not your type."

"What the frak would you know about my type?" Zak laughed. "Last I checked, yourtaste ran to brainy-but-sweet civilians who bore you to tears. Gods, Lee, the librarian—"

"She's an archivist." One Lee had been trying to use her to pry himself away from his brother's girlfriend.

"She's a joke. Just another way of rebelling against the old man." He shook his head. "You think I've got issues? Find someone stronger than Mom was, Lee. You're too much like Dad not to."

Lee surged to his feet, at that. "I'm pretty godsdamned sick of that line, Zak."

"I'm pretty godsdamned sick of your moral high ground, _Lee_." Zak got up, too. "You're the same, all three of you. You, Dad, and Kara. It's why I can't just frakking _ask _ Kara if she frakking cheating on me. If she isn't, she'll never in a thousand years forgive me for suggesting it."

"And if she is?"

"Then she'll admit it. 'So what if I am?' she'll say. Blunt and brutal, like the fact that it's _the truth_ will stop it from killing me. Adama-brand morality. No wonder you… you can't stand her." He reached down to pick up the bottle, realized it was empty, set it down too hard, hard enough that it broke the glass coaster beneath it.

"Always something broken," Laura Roslin murmured, and Lee closed his eyes, next to her.

"You don't get it. She's in my blood, now, Lee. She's in everything. She's poison, like too much ambrosia and I can't frakking get enough."

"_Poison_. For gods' sake, listen to your—"

"I keep having the same thought over and over. I want to ask her to marry me because just asking—it's like baiting a bull, Lee. Like the cliff diving we used to do when we were little. Just the idea of it makes me feel more alive."

And here was a sentence that Lee would be trying to recall for years. He'd known there was something wrong with what Zak had said, known his brother hadn't said, _I want to marry her, she makes me feel alive. _But here—then—it had slipped straight underneath the roaring in his ears, and hidden in the next wave.

The young Lee's chest was heaving, and it took him a long moment to command words. "Marriage. You can't ask her to marry you. You think she's cheating on you," he said flatly.

Watching, Lee wanted to choke the man he'd been with his own hands and demand that he just tell Zak the godsdamned truth, brutal and blunt or no. _She's cheating on you. With me. We were meant for each other. She pities you. She loves the person you think she is. _"You can't even _ask _her if she is because she terrifies you—"

"No. Listen to me, Lee. Really listen to me." Zak waited until his older brother got control of his scowl and his posture of disbelief and met his eyes. "I'm telling you right now: I'm going to marry her. Back off."

"You should wait until she says yes, champ." Lee had turned, trying to seem dismissive, struggling to control his gut. "And ask her a few other questions while you're at it."

There was a long silence after Lee came the closest he ever would to telling his brother the truth. The two brothers watched each other warily. The older Lee and Laura Roslin were the only ones who heard the announcer on the set say, "_…as Anders leads his team to a surprise victory…_"

"I gotta go," the younger Lee said abruptly. "I just… I'll catch you in the morning for breakfast before I ship out?"

"Yeah, man. Yeah. OK. Thanks for… you know, thanks."

And the young Lee left. And what might have been a moment of truth became forever, always, a moment of lies.

It was the last time he'd seen his brother, face-to-face.

Lee turned to the woman—the apparition—beside him. "He didn't show up, you know. He asked Kara to marry him that night. She said yes. They celebrated—got drunk, probably. Overslept."

He'd waited at the diner for about an hour. Waited for the acute torture that meals with his lover and his brother had been for months. When they hadn't shown, he'd guessed what had happened.

"Oh, Lee," Laura's voice was exasperated. "Do you still not see?"

"Frak, yes, I get it. I was a coward. You didn't have to stage this little time traveling morality play to show me, either. I should have told him the truth, but I… I couldn't tell if it would hurt more to tell him or not to tell him. So I didn't decide. I walked away." He shook his head. "It took New Caprica—all that time on the Pegasus, by myself—but I get it, trust me. I'm not a coward anymore."

Laura shook her head impatiently, waving that aside. That was the least of Lee's troubles, and he was right, he wasn't a coward anymore. "You're so upset that Zak didn't see you, Lee." Laura's smile was wry, and the glow coming from the back of her eyes, faint. "But you still don't see him, do you? You won't let yourself." She grabbed his shoulders, and held his eyes. "He knew, Lee. Can't you see that?"

"Knew…?" Lee shook his head. "Knew about me and Kara? There's no way. You heard him just now—he thought I hated her. Wanted me to tell him if I saw something down at the…" He trailed off, thinking about how carefully his brother had been watching him, how out of step with his words that care had been. "Frak," he whispered.

"He was desperate. He was losing her, and he knew it. Knew that she felt as unsafe with you as he felt with her. And yes, he was angry at you, Lee. Very angry."

Lee threw an arm across his stomach, bent over, as rage pounded at his temples.

_Thank the gods_, he was thinking.

"You made yourself see him as a victim because it made you feel like you had control, and like your relationship with Kara had mattered. If he was the victim, that meant that on some level you'd won. But he fought back, Lee. And, in fact, _he_ won."

Lee shook his head. That was still wrong, he had to remind himself that that was wrong. "_No._ He died."

"He died. And she called. And you didn't let yourself go to her. For years." Laura smiled faintly. "He won, Lee. You've been angry at him ever since, and when he died, you buried that anger under a mountain of guilt. Now you have to forgive him for winning. You can do it by forgiving her, for failing you. Just like you finally forgave yourself, for betraying him."

"I wanted to kill him, you know," Lee breathed. "After," he waved his hand at the empty couch in front of them "all that. I imagined him getting into accidents, dying a hundred ways."

Laura nodded. "You were seething with it. But then he died, and so you had to get mad at someone else."

He looked at her, almost in wonder. "_Yes_."

In that instant, as Lee realized how angry he'd been with Zak, he loved his brother as hadn't in nearly a decade. He walked over to the coffee table and picked up the broken coaster. "Frak you, Zak." He shook his head, and sat down for a minute where his brother had been sitting, before the whole world dissolved again.

* * *

><p>When Lee stood up, Zak was dead, and he was in a jail, walking down its long hallway. Somehow—even though it couldn't be right, it hadn't been like this, he remembered that there'd been dozens of people here—somehow the universe had narrowed to be only the size he needed it to be, somehow all the cells were empty. Except one.<p>

Kara Thrace looked at him miserably from behind the bars. "I didn't think you'd come," she whispered.

Truth be told, he almost hadn't—on this, the night before Zak's funeral. He'd been home on bereavement leave for forty-eight of the ninety-six hours he'd been granted. When he'd gotten to Delphi two nights before, he'd driven straight to her apartment—the apartment she'd shared with Zak. And sat outside, in a truck he'd borrowed from a friend who worked for government ops planetside.

The light in her window had gone out a little before sunup, and that had been like a sign from the gods. He'd driven away.

Two nights later, the call had come from the warden that one Kara Thrace had been arrested on public indecency for frakking a stranger behind a bar. She'd asked to be released into his custody. He'd almost put down the phone.

But instead, he'd come down here, and taken in the sight of her in a drunken heap on the bench. And she'd said, "I didn't think you'd come," and he'd said, "forget that I did," and snapped at her to follow him, and put her straight into a cab outside the jail. He'd paid the fare, told her to call someone else next time she was in clink. He'd seen her the next morning at the funeral, and hadn't said a word, just looked at her over Zak's casket and known that it would be that way forever, now. In staying with his brother until he'd _died_, she'd trapped their betrayal in amber and made it their crown jewel. Zak would never forgive them.

He hadn't seen her again until he'd walked into the brig on _Galactica_.

But now he was here again. It seemed different, now. He saw it differently. So he opened the jail cell—it was unlocked, and that couldn't be right, either, could it?—and stepped inside, sank down beside her. "Of course I came."

"I thought you hated me. For staying with him. But I didn't—Lee, you have to know that I told him the truth…" She took in a shaky breath, pressed her trembling lips together until she was back in control. "He just didn't care. He said… he said he _loved me anyway_ and that he needed me and you didn't. I loved him so damned much, Lee. I couldn't leave, and I couldn't—I couldn't fail him, gods, I should have failed him…"

Lee sighed, and with the breath pouring out of his lungs came all the understanding it had taken so long to win. "He should have studied harder. He should have been assigned a different Viper. The run should have started two hours earlier. My father shouldn't have pressured him. I shouldn't have pressured him. It's not your fault, Kara. Not just yours." This, they'd done before. Gods willing, there'd be time now to do it again, a thousand times if they had to.

She gritted her teeth against the tears—his fierce Kara, always at war with her feelings, whichever way they were pulling her. He thought for a moment that there was a wisdom there that he couldn't remember seeing in her, back then. Back_ now_. They'd been so young, before the Cylon attack. "I thought—tonight… I thought you hated me," she said again, more insistently this time.

"I did." He leaned into her hair. "I thought you hated me, too."

"I did."

He pulled her against him harder as her shoulders started to shake, even though he knew she was laughing. With Kara, it was best to hang on tight regardless of the momentary changes in weather, because it was always hurricane season.

"Listen, Kara. I know you loved Zak. I should have told you before. You don't have to choose, not with me. I love the bastard, too. You can love us both."

She sighed. "I never thought you'd…" She took a breath. "Easy to say now that he's…" She trailed off. "_Lee_."

He was wondering how long he'd get to stay with her, here, in this terrible idyll. His father had said that he and Kara carried their pain between them like a heavy sofa, and there was nowhere to put it down. The universe, he thought, had set him down on that sofa. But somewhere, he was plunging down into the eye of the maelstrom. So how long could this last?

"I'm here," he said evenly. "I'm not going anywhere until we—until we forgive each other."

"No—Gods. Lee." She clutched his arm so hard he knew he'd have bruises. "_What is Laura Roslin doing here_?"

His spine turned to ice. How did she, at this moment two years before the Cylon holocaust, even know that name? How did she _see_ Laura at all?

He spun, saw Laura standing outside the cell—and Leoben Conoy, looming behind her. "And Conoy. What the…" Now he reached for her hands, pried them from his biceps and pressed them between his. "Kara. How do you know who Laura Roslin is?"

"How do you know who Leoben Conoy is, Lee?" And now she was laughing again, but it was half-hysterical. "Gods. It's really you, isn't it? Not the you that you were, I mean—the you that you _are_. I mean—"

"I know what you mean, Kara. Just—quickly!—have you been to Earth? When did you leave there?"

"I left when—when that man blew the Horn, on top of the temple. I was following Leoben across the sky. Minutes ago, I think."

They'd _both_ been sent back here, to this moment, in this space between life and death. _Whose life? Whose death? _

Lee didn't take his eyes off of Laura Roslin and Leoben Conoy, but his eyes did brighten. "I found you," he whispered. "I knew I would find you." He turned back to her as Conoy reached for the jail cell's door. "Kara—listen. This is very important." He gripped her hands, one in each of his. "Whatever happens, don't let go."

She looked in his eyes, saw the expression that said, _that's an order, Lieutenant_, and the expression that said, _dear gods, please_, and nodded. "Roger that," she murmured.

Was it just Lee or was it getting hotter, in here? But then that made sense, he thought absently.

Somewhere, he suspected, somehow, Kara's Viper was about to explode. It couldn't withstand the pressure his Raptor could.

"It's time to go, Kara," Leoben said quietly. "Your destiny demands it."

"He's right, Lee," Laura Roslin concurred firmly. "You're finally ready to let her go."

Lee didn't look away from Kara's face. There was a smile threatening to break out on her lips, and he ran a tongue along his teeth to quell the part of him that wanted to laugh out loud at the sight of it. "Make us," she said easily, and squeezed Lee's hands more tightly. He nodded, and spoke succinctly: "Frak destiny."

The heat grew to what should have been an unbearable level. The air was thick with sweat. It was horrifying, actually, to see Conoy sweating so hard, water soaking his shirt and beading all over his face, dripping off of his chin.

In her corner, Laura Roslin was the only one unaffected, perfectly cool, watching Lee and Kara's death grips on each other hands with what looked like approval. "You'll probably change the pattern, Lee. It's a bit dangerous. A lot of points of time converge, here. Reality's a little thinner to accommodate it." Her lips barely moved around the words.

"He knows that!" Leoben all but yelled it. "But you know what she's like. What she does!" He reached to dive for them, to rip Kara away. "Damn you, Daniel! What did you see that I can't?"

But just as his body was about to make contact, the jail, and everyone in it, disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

_I'm proud of you, Lee_, he heard Laura's voice as a whisper in his ears. _Tell your father…_

But then her voice faded away, and Lee opened his eyes.

He was back in his Raptor. The Raptor was screaming downward, on a few klicks from the face of the planet whose atmosphere they'd just hit. As they cleared it, he could see through the window a flaming capsule that he realized was Kara's Viper.

But Kara was still gripping his hands.

"I got it, I got it!" she jerked away and grabbed for the nav stick, even as they were both falling forward, plastered to the control panel. "This is gonna be a rough one, Apollo. Hang on the best you can."

Once she pulled the Raptor so it was level, Lee threw himself toward the ECO controls and scanned the surroundings. "Incoming. Cylon Raider at… oh-two-one karom three-eight-two." He squinted, tried to think, but the change in pressure had been so enormous, his head felt light. "Unless that's… hold fire, Starbuck. That'll be… Daniel."

"Gods," she muttered. "You know where we are?"

"Ten cubits says Cylon Earth," Lee said flatly. "You know when we are?"

"My guess is about two minutes after you saw my Viper explode, a year and a half ago."

"Mine, too." Lee waited a beat. "You lost two months of time around here somewhere, Lieutenant. I'm pretty sure we just found them."

A moment passed, and Kara, her brows furrowed as she lowered the Viper slowly to the planet's surface. "Well. Everything except the fact that we're about to be stranded in the past on an irradiated hellhole of a planet steps away from where I once found my own corpse is really starting to go my way."

Lee tossed his head back and laughed, at that. Kara couldn't remember the last time she'd heard him laugh that way. An involuntary smile fractured her grimace, at the sound of it.

"Did you really fly into the frakking maelstrom for me?" Kara's tone was conversational, as though she weren't even surprised, and for some reason that made Lee feel more confident than he ever had.

"Yeah, well. Thought if you were heading straight into Hades, it might be fun to fly your wing."

"We've gotta get you a job, Apollo." She bit her lip, looked like she might say more, but the crackle of the wireless cut her off.

"Starbuck, Apollo, this is Leoben, do you copy?" His voice boomed into the Raptor, sounding frantic. "I'm in the Raider. Have you seen Daniel?"

Kara grabbed the radio. "Starbuck here. Who the hell is Daniel?"

"C'mon," Lee interjected quietly, "he's your _brother_."

She rolled her eyes. "I figured that much out."

Through the window, Conoy was lowering his Heavy Raider to the ground near them. "Have you seen him? Is he hurt? Where is he? God damn it! This can't all be for nothing!"

With the Raptor's telescopic lens to his eyes, that was when Lee saw the body burning in the skeleton of Kara's Raptor.


	23. All That We Are

**Author's Note: After a long hiatus, I'm back. I _always_ finish stories, and y'all shouldn't fear this will be an exception. Thanks for everyone whose prodding helped motivate me to get this posted.**

**Catching-up help: Lee went through the maelstrom, and Kara, Leoben, Lee, and Daniel crashed on the surface of Cylon Earth. They're back in time at the moment of that crash-basically the moment, canonically, after Kara first disappeared in the maelstrom.**

* * *

><p>Leoben Conoy was on the ground next to Daniel's Viper. No. It was Kara's Viper, with Daniel inside—with what was left of Daniel inside. Yes, that was right. What he and Kara had found here on Cylon Earth—what they still would find, in a few months' time—had never been Kara's body.<p>

Or if it had been, it wasn't now.

Processing: this body was actually Daniel's body, this present was actually the past, and he was back on a Godforsaken planet he'd first set eyes on six months ago, three months from now. But none of the contradictions meant a damn. _Daniel is dead. He's dead. He was the last variable, not Kara._

Leoben had his knees up, and his head down between them. That was why Kara's voice came muffled to his ears. It was increasingly urgent, though.

"Leoben. We have to bury him." He looked up to tell her he'd heard her the first five times and saw her hand on Lee's shoulder, Lee's lips compressed with an emotion that Leoben couldn't quite summon the will to fathom. Though it was _Kara's_ hand on _Lee's_ shoulder, Leoben could tell by the way it was clenched around the knuckles that Lee was the one comforting her.

Humans were strange, but he could read every one of Kara Thrace's thousand perverse gestures. Among other reasons, she was a lot like Daniel, relentless and contrary and impatient with her own bottomless well of weaknesses.

"No. We can't." _Is that my voice? So weary. _"We can't. We're in the past, Kara. You—we still have to discover it—when the Fleet finds Cylon Earth. When you lead us here. You can burn it, then. You did. You will."

They had been here before, and would be here again in a few months' time. He had been with Kara when she'd found this wrecked heap in the tall grass that shouldn't, by rights, be able to grow here, on a day as dismal as this one was bright and beautiful. That other day, he'd seen the terror take her over. He'd done a DNA scan—that had been back when the base star had given his mind access to a database that allowed it. Another lifetime, it seemed like, now. He'd believed what Kara had believed. They'd thought it was _her_ dead body, because it hadn't occurred to him it could be her genetic twin's.

He hadn't let it occur to him. And so he'd thought that Daniel had finally solved his "irresolvable variable," and that it was Kara Thrace.

_I believed that, somewhere in time, Kara had died, and so somewhere in time, Daniel would finally be able to come home. And I ran away out of kindness—so she wouldn't see my joy._

At least he could say that he'd been ashamed at feeling joy at the news of her death. Kara Thrace had shown him that Hypatia Syndrome, whereby hostages became enamored of their captors, could sometimes work in reverse.

"Last rites—at least." Leoben opened his mouth to refuse, and Lee opened his, looking like he was ready to argue, as well. But she cut them both off. "Daniel saved us all. If you told us the truth, he gave a _lot _of time to saving us all. He deserves last frakking rites."

"I told you the truth." Leoben let his voice lingered on that last word. _God, I loved him so much past anything else I'd ever imagined loving._

There were truths of the heart, and then there were truths of God, and Daniel's story, their story, was both. Daniel—gods, his chest ached just thinking about his experiment. So noble, so zealous. So ultimately futile, though he supposed Kara couldn't see it that way. It had saved her life.

He looked at the way Lee Adama's face was clenched, and supposed the man hadn't quite grasped that Daniel had saved his, as well. "Believe it, Major."

"But I don't believe it," Lee bit out. "You can't expect us to believe that he tried everything—that _fourteen _frakking dead planets later, that _this _is the best of all possible universes."

"He was a genius. There was no mind better. Genius enough to interrupt God's plan!" Leoben wouldn't have recognized the pious thunder leaping from his eyes, but Kara would. Kara did, and she crossed her arms over her chest defensively.

"You think the gods wanted us all to die?" Lee's brows shot up. "People think _I'm _a skeptic—"

But Kara wasn't a skeptic. "Or else Daniel fulfilled it," Kara said flatly. "God's plan, I mean."

Lee scowled. "A universe-scaled experiment, using the damned Horn of Cronus—which he could somehow control—"

"The sound waves' emission quality has resonance with tachyonic particles and acts like half-integer spinning neutrinos after a supernova." He doubted Adama's physics education had stretched so he could follow even that far, which was why he hadn't offered the explanation the first time.

"Right." Lee scowled. "So he bounces back and forth in time with the Horn of Cronus, changing one variable at a time, tweaking the universe so that humans and Cylons survive each other—only it never makes a difference, because we all die, every time, anyway. And _he_ watches, with a god's-eye-view of the godsdamned universe, and then tries again. Destroys resurrection one time, introduces it differently another. Stops the final five, or one of them, or four of them, on their way to the Twelve Colonies. Or later. Negotiates peace. Repopulates Kobol. Kills Gaius Baltar at four different moments."

"Would've liked to be there for those," Kara muttered.

"And none of it made a godsdamned difference! One way or another, we all kill each other any which way things played out. I just—I don't buy it. There must have been something he didn't try. I mean, why didn't he come back to _here_, but earlier—before the Cylons destroyed their own world?" he gestured contemptuously at the irradiated wasteland spreading out from their feet in every direction. "Or go back to Kobol, a few thousand years ago, before the twe—the thirteen tribes dispersed—to forge some kind of lasting peace that wouldn't require us to sacrifice nearly everyone? Interrupt the gods' plan? This frakking thing _makes_ you a god!_" _He kicked the Horn at his feet, and Kara, her piety quieted by what they'd learned, only watched, her brows knit together, arms clutching herself even more tightly.

"He _was_ a god. He lived thousands of years, with the help of resurrection. And he tried a thousand ways." Leoben's voice was heavy. "Maybe more. He came to me dozens of times that I can remember—hundreds of times, in other timestreams that are gone now—to tell me what had gone wrong. Always to ask for my advice, my help. 'Get Ellen onto the _Rising Star _before the attack. It might make all the difference.' 'Take Kara captive and let her kill you.' 'Convince the Twos to make peace with the humans.' He never came to—mourn what we'd lost. To ask for me to go with him. To remind me of our marriage vows, of what I destroyed. To let me ask for forgiveness."

That was another truth that went down to the heart of God. The only one Leoben could hold onto, just now. "I betrayed the love of my life, and now there'll be no redemption. No thousandth chance."

And it felt mundane to simply sit and hold his knees to his chest and speak plain truths.

But there was nothing else left to do except watch Lee Adama's eyes trace over the Viper wreck, over a corpse Kara had once thought was hers and hadn't let him see. Leoben could almost read on his face that that was what he was thinking about. Bill Adama's son had hid his heart in a cage for as long as Leoben had known him, but Leoben understood few things as well as cages.

"Leave it alone, Major," he said, to stave off the pathetic salve that Adama was undoubtedly formulating.

"But—you say he came to you. Surely that means he forgave—"

"It doesn't mean shit." Kara cut him off. Leoben knew what she was telling Adama; she _hadn't_ come to him, and that had actually been the hallmark of her love. He wondered if Adama could hear that as plainly as he could. When Lee nodded at her, his jaw tight, Leoben figured that he heard. The man was probably almost as fluent in Kara Thrace as he himself was. _Poor fool._

Kara turned back his way, and her eyes, as ever, were merciless, which was a relief. He wasn't sure he could bear pity. "Tell me why he gave me the coordinates to Earth. Tell me how."

"He didn't."

Kara took an aggressive step toward him, and this time it was Lee's hand on _her_ shoulder. She shrugged it off, but she froze where she stood. _God, but the two of them are attuned.  
><em>  
>Her eyes were still hard. "I have to know, Leoben." She probably didn't think he heard the plea, but he did, and so did Adama, judging by the way he shoved his hands in his pockets and turned to the side, as if giving her a moment of privacy to remove a piece of food from her teeth.<p>

Leoben looked at his wrist, as though there'd be a watch there—as though there ever had been—as though it mattered what time it was. He thought for a moment. "Here's what I know," he said finally. "His last strategy was to go back in time, to the moment the FTL was invented, and—interfere. Calibrate it so that the coordinates of a certain song would lead to Earth."

He could see that that explanation satisfied Lee, who, as an adult, compensated for having had a childhood love of magic tricks by demanding to see the false bottom of every hat.

Kara was less impressed. "Why a song? Why not just give me the coordinates to Earth? As sleight of hand, it's—it's frakking silly."

"And cruel," Lee added softly.

"He couldn't get close to her; genetically, they're too much the same person." Kara's eyes were bright and she blinked, squinted at him, as she seemed only now to realize that it was her sameness with her twin—with Daniel—that had spawned Leoben's hell, the hell he'd trapped her in again and again.

"You," she breathed, "you—"

"The universe wouldn't let him touch you, Kara. Not while time bent around him like it did." Leoben shrugged. "He said it was just like travelling through time and running into yourself. A paradox, and God rigged the whole universe to prevent those."

"And how did he determine that the way to Earth had to come from Kara?"

One corner of Leoben's mouth turned down. "Because he couldn't touch her—not directly—she was the irresolvable variable, he said." He put his head back on his knee. That was a little better; he didn't have to see them, didn't have to take their pain or joy seriously, and could be left to his own. "I don't know how your father came to you. I do know Daniel couldn't have done that."

"But he knew my father would."

"Somehow. I suppose so."

They were all quiet for a long time, Kara leaning on the Viper next to Daniel's body, Lee beside her staring inward and seeming to struggle, Leoben contemplating it all impassively from the ground

"That's why you said you see the patterns." Kara was looking away from Conoy for the first time since they'd seen this Viper. "Daniel explained to you the way the other realities worked out—all the ways in which the humans failed. You could see how time collapsed in on itself."

"Yes. It was like… being shown glimpses of a tablet in an old language you don't completely understand, where some of the words are worn off. Tantalizing. I thought I could see, when he told me—before you and I first met—that I should tell you you'd find Kobol, and that it would lead the way to Earth."

"I remember."

"You remember what else I said?"

Kara's lips were stiff as pipes. "Every frakking word."

"I told you I don't just see patterns. I see the love that bonds everything together." Leoben grimaced. "That was Daniel's doing. And so when we got here, and we found the wreckage… I thought I finally understood. He'd trapped you, Kara, in a pocket of time. Ripped two months out of your life, when everyone thought you were dead, dispatched you to bring the Fleet to Earth and build the Temple, and then called you back to actually die. So I thought." He shook his head. "Because I thought that then—when you were dead—he could come close, come back. Without you and your lost time to hold him at bay."

"He pulled me close a few minutes ago and now he's dead," she gritted. Kara's hair, long from her months on Earth, fell forward to shield her face. _And to shield the guilt. She always blames herself. No reason to take advantage of it anymore_. There was a darkness bubbling up in him, a war between remorse and blame, grief and rage. _Then again, no reason not to. _

But Adama cut him off before he'd fully formulated his sally. "That moment when he came to you with the song—that would have been right around the time your father died," Lee said suddenly.

Kara went pale. "The time my father _what_?" she gritted.

"There hasn't been any time to tell you, but—we went back to Caprica. Me and the Chief and Olivia—"

"_Olivia_—but she _murdered_—" Kara shook her head. "When did this happen? When in—when in time? How long have I been gone?"

Lee grabbed her shoulders. "It's OK. Not long—a few weeks." Conoy could tell he was eager to gloss over those weeks—something awful must have befallen the Fleet once they'd left—but he could see Kara was willing herself to let him gloss. "Oh, gods, Kara, it's a long frakking story, but your dad met Sam in a bar thirty years ago. They were friends, and he got mixed up in their project—and then he got trapped in a bunker under C City, when things went south. That's been a lot of years, now."

"So he was alive." Kara's words burned, but her eyes were ice. "My whole childhood, he was _trapped. _Underground. In a frakking bunker."

Leoben, who'd inadvertently been instrumental in trapping the man, leaned sideways so his head touched the burnt-out nose of the Viper, still more hot than warm though the fire had been out for at least an hour.

"Yes," he heard Lee say gently.

"And he's… he's dead now."

Conoy was waiting for Lee to look at him, assess his readiness. He just looked at Adama and nodded. Yes, He'd go with them. There was no point in not going. There was no point in being anywhere, now.

"Not _now_, no." Lee waited for her, watched her eyes widen as awareness dawned that they were in the past, that some things were not yet done. "So… I've got an idea for these missing two months of your life. Wanna go see him?"

The flash of fire came to her eyes, but now the words were ice. "He's going to die," she whispered.

Lee shook his head. "Not before we get there."

Conoy shuddered, but neither of them noticed.

She nodded, and looked back to Conoy. "Last rites," Kara said again. "Even gods get them. And he was my… my brother." She crouched down beside him, and, in a gesture that Leoben figured Lee would never understand if he lived as many lives as Daniel had, held out her hand to a man who'd more than once driven her to her brink and over it. Leoben took it and let her haul him to his feet.

Conoy gritted his teeth as if facing an enemy. "Daniel was my lover, husband, partner, and best friend. The light of all my life, of ten thousand lives. The savior of all the lives that are left." _The destroyer of my every dream, the unreality in my every projection, the hope at the center of my every lie._

Kara gave Lee her other hand.

"God of all things," Leoben began, even as Kara said, "Lords of Kobol, hear our…" Kara's eyes welled up, and Leoben closed his. "We can both pray," Leoben pacified her, eyes still squeezed shut. "Go ahead."

And so they prayed together, though Lee said nothing, merely left his head bent, the skeptic still awkward in his conversion.

Leoben finished a ceremony he'd inherited from a civilization whose ruins they were standing in, a ceremony that had had little meaning in the days when he'd believed he would never have to die. "We thank you, God, for delivering unto us the most basic article of faith—"

Kara's hand clenched around his in a fist, but he was still surprised that it wasn't only Kara who finished the words with him, but Lee Adama, as well.

"That this is not all that we are," they murmured, and let silence fall around Leoben's thickly muttered "Amen." Kara's grip didn't ease for long moments.

Finally, Lee dropped her hand to touch, gently, the tags around her neck.

"One last thing," Adama said quietly, and then Leoben understood. "For honor."

Her eyes widened, and then she swallowed and nodded. She grabbed the dog tags, and draped them gently around what was left of Daniel's neck, tucked them in the charred remnants of his flight suit. "And I still have to find these. When the Fleet gets here." She took a breath. "Baltar tested our DNA to prove this is me," her mouth twisted, "but I'll only need to see these." She laid a hand on the seat behind him, seemed to be about to kiss what was left of his face. Leoben thought she might have whispered something, but her lips didn't quite move.

When Kara walked off, her shoulders resolute, to check their supply levels, Lee stayed back, and Leoben thought maybe he understood why Kara had extended her hand, after all.

"Something else bothering you, Major?"

Lee hesitated. "It's just… something doesn't make sense."

_Like how it ended. I can't believe it myself. _"What's that?"

"He came to me—on top of the Temple, on Earth. He spoke to me like he was reminding me of a conversation we had. 'Don't forget that you have obligations, too. You made a promise. And even _our_ supplies won't last forever.' Something like that." Lee leaned back on the Viper, next to Daniel, so he didn't have to look at him. "He seemed to think I'd met him before, made a promise. He was so lost in time… do you think he just forgot that that was the only time we ever spoke in the—you know, in the real timestream?"

"No." He didn't have to think about it. "He was a genius with time, like no mind you've ever known. You've either forgotten a promise or…"

"Or I haven't made it yet."

Lee took a long breath, and ran his hand up and down the underbelly of Kara's Viper.

"Scared yet, Major?"

Lee smiled, a little, at that. "Yeah. About as scared as you've been for a long, long time." And with that he walked away to find Kara, and Leoben was glad, because he wanted to lay down on his back in the tall grass and damn the sky of a planet that had no right to its sunshine, and it was easier to hold onto rage when you were alone.

Laying there, he heard them.

"...doesn't matter, 'cause you're alive."

"You don't get it, do you, Apollo?" Kara's voice walked across the grass and whispered into Leoben's ears. "Now _you're_ lost in some junkyard of lost frakking time. So where are these months of _your_ life going to come from? Where will they send _you_, when it's over?"

Leoben had wondered when that would occur to them.

"Yeah, I don't care. Uh uh—shut up. Don't care. It's not your fault, Kara, and if you apologize, I swear to the gods I'll have you court-martialed. _No_—stop it, we'll figure it out. You're _alive_." And then Conoy figured the Major had tackled her or swept her off her feet. He looked away from the too-perfect sky long enough to see a glimpse of her hair flying out above the tall yellow grass that was almost the same color. And then, no more than twenty yards from Daniel's corpse, from this place she'd thought was her gravesite, Kara Thrace let out a peal of laughter as easy as any Leoben had ever heard before the end of the worlds, and that laughter cut across the grass and echoed in the interior where a burnt, slumped Daniel lay, ugly and silent and inglorious in his last moment of valor. And it seemed to hang there, in the air.

Reason enough for Conoy to smile, and then to let his tears begin to fall.


End file.
